A kick-off workshop at the end of June brought together all the project partners from research and industry at the CITEC research center, who will spend the next three years investigating how a robot can help in the kitchen. As part of the technology network it's OWL, the project is being funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia with 1.04 million euros. Of this amount, 276,000 euros each will go to three subprojects at Bielefeld University in the areas of intelligent systems, neuroinformatics and digital linguistics.

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When humans and robots work together on cooperative tasks, each partner needs appropriate space to act. The new DFG project SEMIAC explores perceptual and behavioral strategies of a mobile robot which considers implicit non-verbal signals of a human collaborator for its own navigation and acting. SEMIAC stands for Semantic Environmental Models for Implicit Action Coordination with humans. The joint DFG project with University of Magdeburg started in December 2022 and is funded for three years. While Madgeburg focusses on the perception and interpretation of interaction-relevant features (head and body poses, facial expressions, scene context), in Bielefeld this is combined with adaptive robot behaviors considering human intentions. The overall goal of the project is to reduce interruptions and interaction breakdowns in the close collaboration between humans and robots.