HARK tutorial
We invite you to attend our free tutorial at Université Pierre and Marie Curie on February 29, 2012, to learn how to make a real-time robot audition system using HARK. Participants will practice using the system with an embedded microphone array, such as the Kinect.
What is HARK?
HARK has been described as the "OpenCV" for sound processing. The open source robot audition software called HARK (HRI-JP Audition for Robots with Kyoto University) was released in 2008 as a result of more than ten years of research activities, like organized sessions on robot audition at IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2004–2011).
It provides a number of modules for supporting many multichannel sound cards, advanced signal processing like sound source localization and separation, and automatic speech recognition of separated speech. A user can make a real-time robot audition system by connecting the prepared modules in the GUI programming environment, Flowdesigner. HARK has been applied to many robots like NAO, HRP-2, Robovie, and SIG.
HARK has recently been featured on the new ASIMO and Willow Garage's telepresence robot, Texai.
What's new?
In February 2012, HARK 1.1 will be released with the following new functions and improvements:
- Support for Microsoft Kinect, PlayStation Eye, 64 bit Linux
- Modules for integration with ROS (HARK-ROS)
- Noise-robust sound source localization
- Tools for generating transfer functions
- Packages for visualization and logging with Python and MATLAB (HARK-python, HARK-MATLAB)
- Rich, updated documentation
- Many bugfixes
Timetable
10:00-10:10 Introduction 10:10-10:40 Overview of HARK 10:40-11:10 Practice 0: System boot and Kinect setting 11:10-12:00 Practice 1: Sound localization system 12:00-14:00 Lunch break 14:00-15:00 Practice 2: Sound source separation and speech recognition system 15:00-15:20 Break 15:20-16:20 Practice 3: Dialog system based on HARK 16:20-17:00 Live demonstration
Requirements for participants
We would like to ask each participant to bring a laptop PC, and a Microsoft Kinect or a Sony PlayStation Eye, which are used in Practices 0-3. The laptop PC (Windows, Linux (Ubuntu 10.04) or Mac OS X running VMWare Fusion) should have a bootable DVD player, USB, Core2Duo or higher CPU, and > 1GB memory. "VMware player" (free software, version 4.0 or later) should be installed in advance.
This tutorial is open to the public.
How to register
Send an e-mail to HARK12Paris-Reg_at_zeus.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp (replace _at_ with @) with the following contents:
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Subject: 6th HARK Tutorial
I will participate in the 6th HARK tutorial.
- Name:
- Affiliation:
- E-mail address:
- PC (type, vendor, version):
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