The new Cornell University ECE 4760 projects are out! This  Clap Follower Robot will sit and wait until it hears a loud clap like sound and immediately turn and move towards it. Tejaswini Srinivasa and Asmaa M’nebhi designed it to ignore normal room sounds such as people speaking but as soon as a sharp sound like a clap is made it immediately senses it and jumps into action. They are using 3 microphones to detect where the sound is coming from.
“The sensors used to detect sound are microphone sensors. Three sensors were placed at the three vertices of an equilateral triangle of sides 23 cm. Each sensor circuitry consists of one low power dual operational amplifier LM358 and a peak detector circuit. The two op-amps of LM358 are used as amplifiers with a gain of 20 and a comparator with Vref = 2.56V. The output of the comparator is fed into the MCU Port D2, D3 and B2 for sensors S0, S1 and S2 respectively. A positive edge on the output of the comparator when a ‘clap’ is detected, generates an interrupt INT0, INT1 or INT2 for S0, S1 or S2 respectively.”
