topic Research

Interfaces - Human-Machine Communication

In the future computers will be even more commonplace than today. Robots will no longer be working in separate areas in production facilities but together with their human colleagues. In the office and home sector there are computers which are fun to work with and other which are rather time consuming. This means that there is a considerable need for research and development for interaction between humans and computers. Studying all possibilities for enhancing the case of use of computers as well as the design of functional and intelligent IT tools are the fields of work of human-machine communication.

There are tools which can only be operated by experts. For years, computers were exclusively constructed for computer professionals. The success story of computers with a graphical user interface and mouse has demonstrated that the use of computers can be made easier. The ideas originated from studies of human-machine communication which is called "User Interface Engineering" in the US.

However, development has progressed beyond mouse and computer screens. Language, gestures and other forms of communication have already been tested for interactions with computers. Newly emerging applications and increasingly smaller systems require entirely new solutions for computer control. In the future, innovative solutions for human-machine-interaction will be a precondition for attracting customers for new systems. In this important future-oriented field, the BMBF sets three new priorities:

"Virtual Worlds"

German research is currently among the world leaders in the area of virtual and augmented reality. This includes the presentation of entirely artificial, virtual worlds just like the enhancement of real sensory impressions by computer-generated additional information. An example of augmented reality (AR) is driver information which is already provided by some automotive manufacturers and is displayed on the windshield in the driver's field of vision.

The research area "Virtual Worlds" is important and increasingly interesting for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as sufficiently performing hardware has become affordable. However, large companies can also benefit from the technology, e.g. in the extremely complex laying of cables in aircrafts, vehicles, etc., which is supported by techniques of augmented reality.

The results of BMBF research projects have led to 40 patents over the past four years. Now, this research must be consistently continued in order to increase the lead. The technological challenges are:

• marker-less tracking, i.e. the tracking of real scenes in a normal environment, and in particular the exact determination of positions and orientation in mixed worlds without special markers,
• the development of software development systems and in particular of an AR-specific processing of complex facts and existing dynamic and static data,
• the further development of data goggles and high-performance head-mounted displays which are both lightweight and robust, as well as
• the user-centred design of these technologies.

Service Robotics

In the industrialized countries, in particular in Germany and Japan, the society is aging rapidly. It is foreseeable that in a few years, there will no longer be a sufficient number of care personnel. Service robots for the private sector are aimed at this area. In an industrial environment, there is a growing need for robots which can operate together with humans in a work environment. When robots are moving freely in workshops they must be able to reliably recognize humans and avoid hazards in order to prevent accidents. At the same time, robots must interact more closely with humans in order to better use the abilities of humans and machines.

The objective is therefore to develop the interaction of humans with robots at the technical level in such a way that cooperation between humans and robots in industrial as well as private environments - e.g. with the elderly - becomes possible. Germany is among the world leaders in the area of service robots. The development of service robotics to the stage of application will take another five to ten years. The market for service robotics is therefore still open. We must try to conquer it. The main target areas should be medicine, cleaning, control and safety as well as home robots.

"Semantic Web"

The development of the World Wide Web (WWW) is currently progressing from the conventional annotation of websites with HTML description tools to content and even automatic annotation. Technical tools are being developed for users to conduct a search on the Internet directly by means of entering language and additional gestures. The objective is to enter spoken sentences as a request which then generates a complete content answer. So far, all sites on the Internet containing a specific search word are shown. German research plays a worldwide leadership role in this area of so-called multimodal interaction with the Internet and of content search on the Internet. There is a large global market for applications of this technology.