Best known as the World Wide Web (WWW) for Robots, RoboEarth is a huge network and database that lets lets robots share data with each other and learn from each other's behavior. Closely related to how we humans learn from the other's experience (wait, do we?), RoboEarth brings a platform for materializing the phrase "Experience is the Best teacher!". Developed by engineers and researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, RoboEarth is a step forward in machine cognition and behaviour and sophisticated human-machine interaction. RoboEarth’s World-Wide-Web style database stores knowledge generated by humans – and robots – in a machine-readable format. Data stored in the RoboEarth knowledge base include software components, maps for navigation (e.g., object locations, world models), task knowledge (e.g., action recipes, manipulation strategies), and object recognition models (e.g., images, object models).

RoboEarth offers a Cloud Robotics infrastructure, which includes everything needed to close the loop from robot to the cloud and back to the robot. The RoboEarth Cloud Engine (also called Rapyuta) makes powerful computation available to robots. It allows robots to offload their heavy computation to secure computing environments in the cloud with minimal configuration.


Back in 2011, a team of 35 people had developed a Tech United medical robot AMIGO, capable of independently learning to pick up objects and serve them to bed-ridden patients. After four years of research, the team is ready to showcase RoboEarth through a demonstrator that includes four robots collaboratively working together to help patients in a hospital. These robots will use RoboEarth as a knowledge base, communication medium, and computational resource to offload some of their heavy computation. Till then, you can check out a video about RoboEarth from RosCon 2013 here -

Rene van de Molengraft, the RoboEarth project leader said, "The problem right now is that robots are often developed specifically for one task. Everyday changes that happen all the time in our environment make all the programmed actions unusable." "A task like opening a box of pills can be shared on RoboEarth, so other robots can also do it without having to be programmed for that specific type of box," he added.

What do you think about RoboEarth and its practical implementations and uses? Share your thoughts with us in replies below.