Thinking Head Software Framework (THSF) is part of ther 'Thinking Head Project', one of three Thinking Systems Special Initiatives grants jointly funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NH&MRC), for the years 2006 to 2011. The project is based at MARCS Auditory Laboratories at University of Western Sydney (UWS) Bankstown campus, but drawing on the resources of the ARC Human Communication Science Network (HCSNet), has sites at RMIT; Macquarie University; Flinders University; University of Canberra; Technical University, Berlin; Denmark Technical University; and Carnegie Mellon.

The open source software project develops the middleware necessary for the TH Project. The Articulated Head [3,4] (currently on display at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney) uses the THSF extensively. Core components of the framework are released under GPLv3. The software project is at an alpha stage of development at the moment.

 

 

Figure below shows an example configuration of the EM Framework (as used in the Articulated Head). Components marked in red are EM specific and clicking on them will take you to their respective download page (when available). Not all components are released under a GPLv3 licence and some components are only available to Thinking Head partners. Best way to get started is to download and install Event Manager and the Universal Client to set up a simple client-server system.

Publications

 

[1] D. C. Herath, Z. Zhang, and N. Yadav, "Thinking Head Framework: An Open Architecture for Human Centred Robotics," in International Conference on Information and Automation for Sustainability, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 2010.


[2] D. C. Herath, C. Kroos, C. J. Stevens, L. Cavedon, and P. Premaratne, "Thinking Head: Towards Human Centred Robotics," in The 11th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision, ICARCV 2010 Singapore, 2010.
[3] C. Kroos, D. C. Herath, and Stelarc, "The Articulated Head Pays Attention," in 5th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction Osaka: ACM/IEEE, 2010.
[4] Stelarc, D. C. Herath, C. Kroos, and Z. Zhang, "Articulated Head," Sydney: New Interfaces for Musical Expression++, 2010.