RoboEarth

RoboEarth is a European project to develop a world wide web for robots. This project is a partnership between several universities from the Netherlands, Germany, a Federal technology program from Switzerland, and the Dutch multinational and front runner of technological innovation, Philips.

This ‘internet’ for robots will be composed of a huge network and database where robots can connect to, share information and learn from information from other robots. The goal of Robot Earth is to pave the way for rapid advances in machine cognition and behavior. This will ultimately lead to smooth and sophisticated human-machine interaction.

The revolutionary aspect of this project is that robots will be able to autonomously learn how to improve their behavior from other types of robots, meaning that a robotic arm stacking cartons of eggs might be able to improve an assistance robot picking up other breakable objects for its patient.

The data stored in the database will be uploaded in a machin-readable format and will contain software components, maps and recognition models like images. Rapyuta, the RoboEarth’s Cloud Engine, will help robots to offload difficult and demanding computations to more powerful computers, to let them handle difficult tasks that would require a lot of time and effort to solve themselves. This data will first go to a secure environment, but it will be kept available within reach due to high bandwidth access for all the robots using the network.