An online “brain” for robots, Rapyuta, has been launched in a bid to standardise robotic behaviour and improve robot mobility.
The “brain” constitutes a web-based database to help robots interpret and interact with the human world, and can perform complex computations on behalf of the robot.
Scientists at Robo Earth, which is a collaboration between five European research institutes, have been working on ways to facilitate robot-human interaction since 2011, fearing unless mobility is improved and robotic reactions standardised, robots will only ever be useful in tightly monitored and menial environments.
Removing the need for robots to feature internal data computation will improve mobility, and would also drive down the cost of operating robots in society.
Robots will be able to turn to the Rapyuta database when encountering a new situation, or object, for example, and will receive instructions on how to react to the circumstance.
Numeric computations, such as are needed to understand human speech, will also be performed by the cloud service, removing the need for extensive data processing equipment internal to each robot.
