The goal of the study was to research different communication modalities needed for intuitive Human-Robot Interaction. This study utilizes a Wizard of Oz prototyping method to enable a restriction-free, intuitive interaction with an industrial robot. The data from 36 test subjects suggests a high preference for speech input, automatic path planning and pointing gestures. The catalogue developed during this experiment contains intrinsic gestures suggesting that the two most popular gestures per action can be sufficient to cover the majority of users. The system scored an average of 74% in different user interface experience questionnaires, while containing forced flaws. These findings allow a future development of an intuitive Human-Robot interaction system with high user acceptance.

The impact of ambient brightness surroundings on the peak velocities of visually guided saccades remains a topic of debate in the field of eye-tracking research. While some studies suggest that saccades in darkness are slower than in light, others question this finding, citing inconsistencies influenced by factors such as pupil deformation during saccades, gaze position, or the measurement technique itself. To investigate these, we developed RELAY (Robotic EyeLink AnalYsis), a low-cost, stepper motor-driven artificial eye capable of simulating human saccades with controlled pupil, gaze directions, and brightness. Using the EyeLink 1000, a widely employed eye tracker, we assessed accuracy and precision across three illumination settings. Our results confirm the reliability of the EyeLink 1000, demonstrating no artifacts in pupil-based eye tracking related to brightness variations. This suggests that previously observed changes in peak velocities with varying brightness are likely due to human factors, warranting further investigation. However, we observed systematic deviations in measured pupil size depending on gaze direction. These findings emphasize the importance of reporting illumination conditions and gaze parameters in eye-tracking experiments to ensure data consistency and comparability. Our novel artificial eye provides a robust and reproducible platform for evaluating eye tracking systems and deepening our understanding of the human visual system.

Humans are able to track the change of color and orientation (CO) of an object at a stunning rate. However, spatially separating those features slows this rate by an order of magnitude – a temporal limit of feature binding that is little understood. Here, we investigate the underlying mechanisms using high-temporal resolution cortical source localization of the magnetic field response elicited by CO-pairs alternating at different frequencies in color and orientation. We show that (1) binding requires a rapid recurrent modulation (~120 ms) of activity in V1/V2, whose latency is independent of the alternation rate. (2) Performance drops to chance when the alternation rate becomes too high to accommodate the recurrent process within a single alternation. (3) CO binding itself is mediated by color-based attention, which gradually biases re-occurring CO combinations containing the attended color. These observations together demonstrate that CO-binding across space depends on rapid recurrent processing in early visual cortex, with its temporal limit being set by the time this process takes to be completed. Binding ultimately results from a slower and gradual attentional bias of the recurrent process instantiating a form of stroboscopic stationarity in the stream of alternations for unambiguous discrimination of the correct feature-combination.