HARK is open-sourced robot audition software consisting of sound source localization modules, sound source separation modules and automatic speech recognition modules of separated speech signals that work on any robot with any microphone configuration.
Since a robot with ears may be deployed to various auditory environments, the robot audition system should provide an easy way to adapt to them. HARK provides a set of modules to cope with various auditory environments by using an open-sourced middleware, FlowDesigner and reduces the overheads of data transfer between modules.
HARK has been open-sourced since April 2008. The resulting implementation of HARK with MUSIC-based sound source localization, GHDSS-based sound source separation and Missing-Feature-Theory-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) on several robots like HRP-2, SIG, SIG2, and Robovie R2 attains recognizing three simultaneous utterances in real time.