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The advent of a World Wide Web for robots will let automatons learn from each other’s experiences – a first step towards them working in the real world

Data57: Anyone got tips on how to pick up a cup of coffee? I either crush it or fail to lift.

FastBot90: Hi Data57. Human programmers worked for months to get me to do this perfectly. Click here to download my data. I have different sensors and physiology to you but hopefully you have software to adapt commands.

This style of conversation will seem familiar if you spend time in web forums. While it is unlikely robots will ever communicate in such a human fashion, a World Wide Web for robots – dubbed – is being developed so that they can exchange information directly.

While robots have previously tapped into the human web for help – for example searching through Google Images when they stumble upon an object they can’t identify – RoboEarth works differently.

Sharing robots

“The key innovation of RoboEarth is having robots generate information and knowledge and share it with other robots,” says of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, one of the roboticists developing RoboEarth.

The idea is that when robots learn a new trick, they will upload how they did it to the RoboEarth database – much like a human adding information to Wikipedia. Then, another robot that needs to use the same trick, or which enters the same environment, will download the data gathered by the first robot, enabling it to “learn” how to do it.

“It’s a compelling vision, the idea of robots being able to learn from each other’s experience, and mining that experience to improve their behaviour,” says , director of open source development at Willow Garage in Menlo Park, California, who is helping to advise the RoboEarth team.

If robots are able to share data with each other without human intervention, then this could provide the skills they need to move out of the narrow industrial applications they are currently used in and into the wider world, where they will be required to deal with a range of unpredictable situations.

To form rules for how to behave in many circumstances the robots will need to fall back on huge amounts of data – something humans simply won’t be able to program into each robot.

Effective cooperation

“Without a system like RoboEarth, robots will never be able to operate effectively in the unstructured and highly complex human environment,” says RoboEarth team member Heico Sandee of the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.

RoboEarth remains in the early stages, but it is having some success in testing. One such test, carried out last month, involved a wheeled droid called AMIGO and a room mocked up to look like a hospital ward.

First, AMIGO – a modified robot originally designed to play football – built up a rough map of the room using its laser beam to measure distances, before uploading it to the RoboEarth database. The team then wiped AMIGO’s memory and sent it back into the room to carry out a task: pick up a drink sitting on a cabinet and serve it to a “patient” in a bed. AMIGO succeeded thanks to the map it downloaded from RoboEarth.

While the same robot was used for both parts of the test, it was a good proof of concept. “What you see is that the robot can download the data, interpret the data and do something useful with it,” says Waibel. His team have also used RoboEarth to share maps between two different robots.

One hurdle still to be jumped is the creation of software that allows robots to pass on tips to other robots that operate in a different way, says , a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Action recipes

Robots with different functions, physiologies and software will need to be able to download information on how to complete a task that is relevant to them. To solve this problem, the team are using a packet of programming code called an “action recipe”.

This is a simple way of describing how to do something – and is how knowledge will be uploaded, downloaded and stored in RoboEarth. An additional “software library” will then translate these recipes into a series of detailed instructions that are suited to the capabilities of that particular robot. Waibel hopes to release the open-source software that will allow anyone to hook up a robot to RoboEarth in July.

But if robots can exchange information independently of humans, could they become more intelligent than us? The roboticists that 91av spoke to say this is unlikely, as the robots will only be able to upload and download information that relates to their goals.

This is not a breakthrough that will make robots autonomous, says Ben Goertzel, who heads the AI company in Washington DC. “If you have an idiot using the internet, they are still going to be an idiot.”