Robots Get Their Very Own Internet
Guess who's getting their own internet? Robots! Robots are getting their own, robot-only internet, thanks to scientists who, according to the BBC, "hope it will allow robots to come into service... armed with a growing library of knowledge about their human masters." Why, hmm, yes, "armed," indeed.
"RoboEarth," as the project has been dubbed,
will be a communication system and a database, [researcher Dr. Markus Waibel] said. In the database will be maps of places that robots work, descriptions of objects they encounter and instructions for how to complete distinct actions.
European scientists have embarked on a project to let robots share and store what they discover about the world.Called RoboEarth it will be a place that robots can upload data to when they master a task, and ask for help in carrying out new ones.
RoboEarth is an Internet facility intended to make "life" easy for robots. You can think of it as the web for robots. Just as you look up something you want to know about on the web, a robot can do the same using RoboEarth, but in addition it will routinely upload data about what it is doing and where it is.
Researchers behind it hope it will allow robots to come into service more quickly, armed with a growing library of knowledge about their human masters.
If you are a fan of the Terminator movies or TV series you might well be thinking "SkyNet" and worrying about robots getting smart and taking over. This might be a worry for the future but at the moment RoboEarth is just a knowledge base and it doesn't have any central intelligence, artificial or otherwise.
RoboEarth will include everything needed to close the loop from robot to RoboEarth to robot. The RoboEarth World-Wide-Web style database will be implemented on a Server with Internet and Intranet functionality. It stores information required for object recognition (e.g., images, object models), navigation (e.g., maps, world models), tasks (e.g., action recipes, manipulation strategies) and hosts intelligent services (e.g., image annotation, offline learning).
