The RoboEarth-project exploits a new approach towards endowing robots with advanced perception and action capabilities, thus enabling robots to carrying out useful tasks autonomously in circumstances that were not planned for explicitly at design time. The core of the innovation proposed by the consortium involves the development of a world-wide web-style database: RoboEarth. RoboEarth will allow robots to share any reusable knowledge independent from their hardware and configuration. When a robot starts performing a task, it is able to download available high-level knowledge on both task and environment, next, it can use and translate this knowledge to its hardware specifications and its configuration and will improve it by learning during the task. Finally, it will upload its knowledge to RoboEarth again. As a result of the proposed project, major innovations are expected in the fields of:
- 3D sensing (object recognition and localization)
- Control strategies (linking perception and action)
- Learning.
Next to these new methods that fully exploit the available a-priori knowledge from RoboEarth, RoboEarth will due to its standardized way of sharing knowledge contribute to a more modular design of robotic systems; robot hardware with a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for RoboEarth will be enough to build a functional robot, using the knowledge available from RoboEarth.
