Southwest Research Institute

Gm Cruise Holdings LLC

Xin Chen

Keith Alan Bartels

Amanda Lind

Yu Rao

Adam C Cobb

Kanthasamy Chelliah

Douglas R Earnest

Systems and methods for vehicles to communicate with people outside the vehicle. In particular, a two-way communication system is provided including exterior microphone arrays on the vehicle. Calls performed from the exterior of a vehicle can be difficult to implement with acceptable quality in noisy environments. A pipeline having multiple beamformers is provided to improve call quality, where the pipeline operates on the incoming data for each of the microphone arrays. Each beamformer estimates direction of arrival (DOA) of the speech signal, and utilizes the estimated DOA to generate spatial filtering coefficients to filter the signal. A beamformer can be used to generate a one channel output for each microphone array, and a mixer can be used to mix the signal output from each microphone array. The beamformer enables reliable two-way communication with acceptable listening quality and good intelligibility for the remote assistant listening to the captured signal.

Voice pre-processing pipeline for exterior communications on autonomous vehicle

A method of in situ measurement of an acoustoelastic constant (L) of a railway rail, using an ultrasonic wedge sensor to measure a stress-free (unloaded) time-of-flight (t) in the vertical direction of the rail. Next, a vertical load of known load value is applied to the rail. While the vertical load is applied, the ultrasonic wedge sensor is used to measure a stressed time-of-flight value. The difference between the stress-free and the stressed time-of-flight is calculated to obtain a time-of-flight difference value (Δt). Based on the load value, the stress-free time-of-flight value, and the time-of-flight difference value, the acoustoelastic constant, L, may be calculated. The wedge sensor may be further used to measure the (stressed) horizontal time of flight, and a time-of-flight difference value in the horizontal direction may be used to measure longitudinal stress.

Reference-free load-modulated longitudinal rail stress measurement using ultrasonic LCR waves

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San Antonio, TX, United States of America

Xin Chen