Bridging the Modality Gap: Daredevil, an Edge-Native Auditory Scene Awareness Engine for Embodied Robots (Part I — The Ears)

Every affordable microphone array is planar and azimuth-only; everything three-dimensional is a $30,000 laboratory instrument. Robots therefore receive sound as a stream while receiving vision as a scene. Project Daredevil closes this gap at the sensor: geometry-agnostic 3D spatial decomposition over any microphone constellation, user-loadable ML models on a single edge DSP, and identity-conditioned attention routing that emits a live spatial awareness map — identity, class, azimuth, elevation, range, confidence, priority — instead of raw audio.

Provisional patent filed May 2026. Open-source reference design in development, in partnership with Ultimate Bots.