RoboEarth: Connecting robots world-wide

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. Bringing a new meaning to the phrase “experience is the best teacher”, the goal of RoboEarth is to allow robotic systems to benefit from the experience of other robots, paving the way for rapid advances in machine cognition and behaviour, and ultimately, for more subtle and sophisticated human-machine interaction. RoboEarth offers a complete Cloud Robotics infrastructure, which includes everything needed to close the loop from robot to RoboEarth to robot. The RoboEarth World-Wide-Web style database is implemented on a server with Internet and Intranet functionality, making it attractive for both research and business applications. It stores information required for object recognition (e.g., images, object models), navigation (e.g., maps, world models), tasks (e.g., action recipes, manipulation strategies) and hosts intelligent services (e.g., image annotation, offline learning). To close the loop, the RoboEarth Collaborators have implemented components for a ROS compatible, robot-unspecific, high-level operating system as well as components for robot-specific, low level controllers accessible via a Hardware Abstraction Layer.