Summary
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In shared-control systems a human operator
and an automated technical system are interdependently in charge of
control. For this to be effective, the operator has to be constantly
provided with relevant information about the current system state. This
is non-trivial because the state cannot be exclusively defined by the
internal parameters of the automation, for example air speed of a
plane, remaining fuel; it also depends on the specific environment of
the system, for example weather conditions, distance to obstacles.
Moreover the behavior of the user is determined by his or her
naïve theory about the system, built from a personal
interpretation of information deemed to be relevant (world knowledge,
user instructions, system feedback, perception of the environment).
Many shared-control systems are embedded in moving objects (e.g.,
aircraft, cars, intelligent wheelchairs), which means that the majority
of the data necessary for the operator are either directly related to
spatial information, or refer indirectly to space. Moreover, and
particularly in mobile systems, the user must be able to both give and
receive information about actions to be performed by the system; the
issue of mode becomes crucial. Mode-confusion on the part of a user
results in the system and the user no longer being able to communicate,
which can have catastrophic results. This project therefore focuses on
how to present spatial information so as to improve the mode awareness
of the operator, thus avoiding mode-confusion situations. The project s
major emphasis will be on the speech channel, i.e. interaction via
dialogs. These must enable the user to make enquiries about the system
state, the system to ask for clarification in a possibly confusing
situation, and both participants to obtain agreement about a compatible
modeling of the situation. The components for natural language
interaction adopted within the project will provide natural language
capabilities for the SFB/TR as a whole; here the re-use of existing
technology via defined generic inter-module interfaces will be central.
The project will also explore an innovative direction in which the
dialog situation is modeled in a way similar to the shared-control
situation; in both situations the behavior of the user (the dialog
partner) is determined by naïve theories about dialog goals and
system abilities (cf. project I1-[OntoSpace]). Formal methods are
expected to improve the quality and robustness of shared-control
systems and the natural language interaction in shared-dialog
situations also.
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Subject Areas
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Cognitive
Robotics
Formal Methods
Computational Linguistics
Artificial Intelligence
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