ROBOEARTH

The RoboEarth project was initiated by a multi-disciplinary partnership of robotics researchers from academia and industry. Their goals: – to prove that connection to a networked information repository greatly speeds up the learning and adaptation process that allows robotic systems to perform complex tasks, and – to show that a system connected to such a repository will be capable of autonomously carrying out useful tasks that were not explicitly planned for at design time. In December 2009, the group received four-year funding from the European Commission’s Cognitive Systems and Robotics Initiative to develop RoboEarth’s open-source network database platform and develop a series of demonstrators to prove the concept. The demonstrators include using the RoboEarth platform to: – create and execute action recipes – integrate localization and mapping – perform 3D sensing – learning control – track objects dynamically – mine data from RoboEarth past data The hope is that, with a proof of concept in place, the RoboEarth database can be used as a launch pad for further research and development, leading eventually to standardization, common language protocols and a more modular design of cloud robotics systems.