A group of European researchers are
developing a project called RoboEarth, which will let
robots exchange information on how best to complete a task.
The idea is to build up a library of knowledge, accessible
through open standards, that'll let robots come into
service more quickly -- they won't have to learn how to do
something from scratch every time, they'll be able to benefit from
others' learnings in the same way human communities share
Markus Waibel from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
BBC: "Most current robots see the world their
own way and there's very little standardisation going on. Most
researchers using robots typically develop their own way for that
machine to build up a corpus of data about the world."
Currently, Waibel says, roboticists put lots of effort
into solving the same problems every time they work with a new
robot. Allowing the mechanoid to access the experience of robots
before him, defined in such a way that it's usable to new bots,
could allow the field to advance rather more rapidly.
Waibel likened the project to Wikipedia.
"Wikipedia is something that humans use to share knowledge, that
everyone can edit, contribute knowledge to and access," he said.
"Something like that does not exist for robots." Other
initiatives are working on standardising the way robots sense the
world and encode that information, but Waibel says that's useless
if the robots can't exchange that knowledge.
RoboEarth is being funded by the EU, and has a team of 35
researchers working on it over the next four years, with the
objective of building a prototype of how the system might work. So
far, robots accessing the knowledgebase can download descriptions
of tasks and execute them, as well as uploading maps of