"Seamless Human-Robot Interaction in Dynamically Changing Environments" (SHRINE). The SHRINE project is located in the field of robotics research with an emphasis on the interdisciplinary field of human-robot interaction. The project aims at providing future robots with interactive capabilities similar to those of humans. Joint action of humans and robots sharing one world is to be facilitated.

The CoTeSys cluster of excellence investigates cognition for technical systems such as vehicles, robots, and factories. Cognitive technical systems are equipped with artificial sensors and actuators, integrated and embedded into physical systems, and act in a physical world. They differ from other technical systems in that they perform cognitive control and have cognitive capabilities.

The EU-project IURO develops a robot that autonomously finds its way to pre-defined places, people or items in quickly changing environments through proactive communication with passers-by.

Telepresence is reached, when technical means enable a human operator to be present in another, removed or not accessible remote environment with his subjective feeling. Teleaction means that this human operator is not only passively present, but that he can also actively intervene at the distant place. These impressions are realistic when the human operator is no longer able to differentiate easily whether his sensory impressions and the feedback of his activities result from direct interaction with the reality or by means of technical means.

A car detects a hazardous situation and reacts appropriately without any intervention of the driver. This may see an impossible scenario right now, however, it may well become thinkable in future: Developing "Cognitive Automobiles" is the objective of the Collaborative Research Center 28 which was started on January 1st 2006.

IMMERSENCE overall objective is to enable people to freely act and interact in highly realistic vitual environments with their eyes, ears and hands. The key-word is multi-modal: Human senses shall be integrated into a single experience allowing comprehensive immersion.

Despite recent improvements in Virtual Reality technology hardly any satisfactory solutions exist that enable users to physically walk through virtual environments in a natural way. In this project our goal is to significantly advance the scientific and technological state-of-the-art by enabling quasi-natural, unconstrained, and omni-directional walking in virtual worlds.

The main objective of this STREP is to research and demonstrate integrative concepts of advanced robotic systems, to be seen as collaborative agents, in various environments working together with humans. ROBOT@CWE will design suitable architectures and technologies to achieve this goal.

Advances in telecommunications opened up new possibilities for the design of control systems. Controllers, sensors and actuators can be spatially distributed over wide areas exchanging information over a digital network. Such an architecture raises challenges that can not be overcome by standard methods and therefore needs a rethinking of the existing theory. The focus of this program is to develop a control theory for modeling, analysis and design of digitally networked dynamical systems.