European researchers last week launched a global Internet for robots called Rapyuta—an online database of information designed "to help them cope" with the confusing world of humans,according to BBC News.
Rapyuta is the work of the European RoboEarth Project, which describes its mission as the development of "a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behavior and their environment."
Last week's launch of Rapyuta represents the first phase of a project that aims to build a large-scale, cloud-based resource for robots of all kinds which would serve as both an informational database and a calculating engine for jacked-in androids. Such a network of information would give massively more useful information to robots which currently rely on their own onboard memory banks and processing power to deal with real-world situations on an individual basis, project researchers said.
"[T]he goal of RoboEarth is to allow robotic systems to benefit from the experience of other robots, paving the way for rapid advances in machine cognition and behavior, and ultimately, for more subtle and sophisticated human-machine interaction," the RoboEarth Web site states.
The use of Rapyuta could also make it far cheaper to produce more mobile robots, since they wouldn't require as much onboard storage and processing power, Dr. Heico Sandee, Robo Earth program manager at the Dutch University of Technology in Eindhoven, told BBC News.
"On-board computation reduces mobility and increases cost," he said, adding that as the network evolves "more robotic thinking could be offloaded to the Web.
The wirelessly accessible database currently serves as a fount of information for "software components, maps for navigation (e.g., object locations, world models), task knowledge (e.g., action recipes, manipulation strategies), and object recognition models (e.g., images, object models)," according to researchers.
Information in the database comes from both robots and humans and is presented in a machine-readable format in a "Cloud Robotics infrastructure which includes everything needed to close the loop from robot to the cloud and back to the robot."
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