Robots Have Their Own Wikipedia

Called RoboEarth, the project is intended to allow robots to share experience so they can learn from each other, with the aim of improving their interaction with humans. It works by robots (or humans) uploading information—like a map, image, or instructions for doing a task—to a cloud-based database in a machine-readable format that other robots can understand. Basically, the robots will all soon be reading each other’s minds.

“At its core, RoboEarth is a World Wide Web for robots: a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behavior and their environment,” the initiative’s website explains. It’s run by six European institutes, including Philips, the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands (where the project will be unveiled on Thursday), and four other universities, and is funded by the European Commission.

The showcase of the project, which has been in development for four years, will involve four robots using RoboEarth in a hospital scenario. “These robots will use RoboEarth as a knowledge base, communication medium, and computational resource to offload some of their heavy computation,” the team promises.

A hospital-like setting is an ideal test for the project, because where RoboEarth could come in handy is in helping out humans with household tasks. A big problem for robots at the moment is that human environments tend to change a lot, whereas robots are limited to the very specific movements and tasks they've been programmed to do.

“To enable robots to successfully lend a mechanical helping hand, they need to be able to deal flexibly with new situations and conditions,” explains a post by the University of Eindhoven. “For example ICM gets to grips with two new climbing robots you can teach a robot to bring you a cup of coffee in the living room, but if some of the chairs have been moved the robot won’t be able to find you any longer. Or it may get confused if you’ve just bought a different set of coffee cups.”

But with a shared knowledge base, the robots could learn this kind of information from each other and constantly stay updated. In a hospital example, the researchers suggest one robot could upload a map to RoboEarth (after using a sensors to scan the room, for instance) so that another could identify something like a glass of water immediately, even if it’s the first time it's set foot in the room. Or one robot could share its knowledge of conducting a task like opening a bottle of pills with all the others, so that each robot didn’t have to be individually programmed to do that. As the researchers ask on their site, “Why are thousands of systems solving the same essential problems over and over again anyway?”