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== The Articulated Social Agents Platform ==

The Articulated Social Agents Platform (Asap) provides a collection of software modules for social robots and virtual humans jointly developed by the http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/ags/soa/ (SOA) in Bielefeld and the [http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/|Human Media Interaction group] in Twente. In addition to a collection of tools, we also provide the means (through middleware, architecture concepts and shared build and deployment strategies) to compose virtual human or robot applications in which the tools are embedded. Asap embeds the SAIBA architecture for behavior realization (left side of the figure) and enhances it with two essential features for fast and fluent virtual human behavior: a close bi-directional coordination between input processing and output generation, and incremental processing of both input and output.

Image(asap_arch.png, align=center) === Citing the Articulated Social Agents Platform: === S. Kopp, H. van Welbergen, R. Yaghoubzadeh and H. Buschmeier, ''An architecture for fluid real-time conversational agents: integrating incremental output generation and input processing'' (2013), in: Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces

=== Example Interactions and Applications ===

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=== Provided components === General: *BuildSystem: The build system jointly developed by HMI and SOA *SoaScript: The package/build tool of AG SOA *Ipaaca: Middleware that implements David Schlangen's Incremental Unit architecture in a distributed fashion (over different computers and programming languages) *ContinuousIntegration: Continuous integration and daily builds

Behavior Realization: *AsapRealizer: A BML Realizer (=behavior generator) for incremental, fluent, multimodal interaction with a virtual human or robot. *[http://sourceforge.net/projects/realizertester/|BMLRealizerTester]: A generic testing framework for BML realizers, developed jointly with [http://ict.usc.edu/|USC/ICT], [http://www.dfki.de/|DFKI] and [http://aiweb.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/|AI]. *[https://github.com/saiba/OpenBMLParser/wiki|OpenBMLParser]: A flexible and extendable implementation for a Java http://www.mindmakers.org/projects/bml-1-0/wiki/Wiki parser/analyzer.

Behavior Planning: *[http://sourceforge.net/p/hmiflipper/|Flipper]: A simple but powerful library for specifying dialogue rules for dialogue systems, that uses XML-templates to describe the preconditions, effects and BML behaviors of these rules.

Computer Animation and Rendering: *HmiRenderEnviroment: A Java-based render and animation environment *HmiPhysics: The Java-based physical simulation framework, aimed at skeleton animation for virtual humans *HmiAnimation: the animationframework used (by default) in AsapRealizer *OgreRenderEnvironment: the Ogre render environment used to steer e.g. Billie *[https://github.com/herwinvw/AsapFbxTools/|AsapFbxTools]: Importers and other tools for e.g. mocap in the Autodesk FBX format

=== Preliminaries === *RecommendedSystemSetup *Streamlining projectmanagment with SoaScript (Linux/Mac only)

=== Support === *ImproveDocumentation -- ''Your support in improving the documentation is highly appreciated'' *ReportBugs -- ''report bugs and request features using tickets''