Coordinators: Thomas Brandt, Gerhard Rigoll

Research area E studies cognitive vehicles, robots, and factories from a human factors and cognitive psychological point of view. Particular emphasis is given to the interpretation of the system's environment and the communication with humans, enabling the collaboration in unstructured environments. The state-of-the-art in all aspects of human-machine communication and to provide the research cluster with the most advanced methods will be advanced in order to equip cognitive systems with highly sophisticated communication capabilities. In order to achieve these goals, neurobiology and technology will inspire each other in order to advance the following aspects of cognitive technical systems: advanced input/output technology, such as e.g. speech, gesture, motion, and gaze recognition is created to construct intuitive user interfaces and dialogue techniques, along with sophisticated methods for evaluation of multi-modal interaction of humans and systems. The highest and most complex level, involves emotion, action, and intention recognition to make cognitive systems more human-like. To pursue these goals, computational user models of cognitive architectures and appropriate experimental evaluation methods will be developed.