Feb 16 2011
A team of 35 researchers from the Europe Union are working on RoboEarth, a project enabling robots to share knowledge for effectively accomplishing a task.
The objective of the research is to develop a knowledge library, which can be accessed via open standards. This eliminates the need for the robot to learn the method of accomplishing the task from scratch. Instead it can learn from other robots’ learning and rapidly achieve the given task.
Markus Waibel from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has stated that robots perceive things in their own way and at present homogeny is not so common. He mentioned that most of the roboticists build their own method for robot to develop a collection of data about the world. He said that presently, researchers strive hard to resolve the same issues each time they handle a new robot. He added that the new library can be used by the roboticists to examine similar experiences of bots and can be utilized to develop new robots, further advancing the robotics field.
Waibel has mentioned that their library will be similar to Wikipedia, which enables humans to exchange, edit and access knowledge. They are working on regulating the method adopted by robots for perceiving the world, encrypting data and also sharing the learning.
The European Union sponsors the RobotEarth project. The scientists will work for another four years, with the mission of developing an archetype for illustrating the working of the library system. Until now, the knowledgebase can be used by the robots to download explanations and accomplish tasks. The robots can also include location maps in the library.
Source: http://www.ethz.ch