Hello ROS community,

We are pleased to announce that our ROS repository for open-source robot
audition software "HARK" is just updated.
http://winnie.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/HARK/


1) Introduction of HARK

HARK provides auditory functions for robots based on microphone array
processing such as 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 on a GUI programming environment, Flowdesigner.
So far, we validated its effectiveness by applying HARK to several robot
platforms like HRP-2, Robovie, SIG.
All the documentation (installation instruction, module documents, cookbook,
some tutorials) can be found at the following website:
http://winnie.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/HARK/


2) What are updated?

Recently, HARK 1.1 was released with the following new functions and
improvements.
 * Supported new microphone array devices: Microsoft Kinect, Sony
PlayStation Eye, Audio-dev Microcone.
 * Released HARK-ROS interface (diamondback, electric, and fuerte)
 * Provided deb packages for Ubuntu 10.04 32bit/64bit (apt-get based
installation is available)
 * Improved sound source localization by introducing a new algorithm,
GEVD/GSVD-MUSIC


3) What is HARK-ROS interface?

HARK -> ROS
The following are some examples of ROS topics available from HARK:
 * Multi-channel raw audio stream
 * Multi-channel frequency spectrum after FFT
 * Sound source localization result
 * Separated audio stream after sound source separation
 * Audio features such as MFCC, etc.
 * std_msgs type messages

ROS -> HARK
 * Subscription of above messages
 * Dynamic parameters for audio processing using dynamic_reconfigure
 * std_msgs type messages


4) Online Information

 * Overview of HARK is available at :
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhBnLySsmJk
 * Information of related papers is at :
  http://winnie.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/HARK/wiki.cgi?page=Papers
 * When you would like to know how HARK works, see our activities at Willow
Garage in 2009 (migration of HARK to Texai)
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi4ACLfaWy0
 * Sound follower tutorial using TurtleBot
  http://winnie.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/HARK/wiki.cgi?page=HARK-ROS-TURTLEBOT

We hope that you are interested in HARK.
If you have any question, please do not hesitate to send email to
hark-support@kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp

Best regards,
HARK support team
hark-support@kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp