Thinking Head Framework: An open architecture for human centred robotics

Thinking Head Framework is the software architecture developed as part of a multidisciplinary research project ´Thinking Head´ aimed at building and evaluating intelligent agents for human machine interaction. Firstly, the framework was designed to make the software accessible to non expert users as in the case of this project where large number of users come from a non-software engineering background. Secondly, the framework caters for both multimodal dialogue type communication between components and humans as well as high speed communication between sensors and robotic components. The framework implements a multi-threaded server and client architecture with TCP socket connections and allows components to be written in a host of popular programming languages including C++, Java and Matlab.