Universität Bielefeld › Technische Fakultät › NI
The Project C4 within the CRC 673 assumes that processes of alignment are not restricted to support language and dialog functions and the execution of speech production, but similar structured mechanisms as well support the cooperative execution of more general actions.
Conceptually this can be regarded as the logical extension of alignment from the field of verbal-communicative actions into the space of non-verbal cooperative actions and as an opportunity to investigate processes bridging the areas of language processing and production on the one side and action processing and execution on the other side.
Besides this extension of alignment into the action domain, we forward the hypothesis that the formation of alignment is adaptive: Repetitions of cooperative actions facilitate the appearance of and raise the level of the achievable alignment. This process of adaptation is an important component of the acquisition of team expertise. Adaptation and adaptive alignment greatly facilitates the need for explicit communication and paves the way for smooth and thus effective common acting.
Operationally this project focuses on three levels of common action processing and execution:
Especially, we will develop a multi-level architecture based on the idea to organise behaviour as flexible bindings of subordinate representations
Alignment in these contexts appears as an increasing capability of smooth cooperative interaction of the robot with the human user.