If you were a robot and didn’t know what to do where you turn for help? That’s right; you would go online and look for some robot buddies or some sort of robot help site.
Well, now you can do exactly that. If you are a robot, of course. The helpful chaps at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have come up with an invention called Rapyuta, which has been described as an online brain.
It is just the first in what is expected to become a web based information database which will help robots cope with life in the real world. It can explain to robots more details about objects they have come across and can also help them with any difficult calculations they need to make. So it’s just having a big brother to turn to, except without the Chinese burns and the smelly underwear.
Cheaper Robots in the Future?
The people behind Rapyuta hope that it will allow creators of future robots to make their devices cheaper because they won’t need to cram so much processing power into them. Now they won’t need to have their own, personal list of objects and situations, as they can look up anything they come across which is new to them.
This work came about as part of the European Robo Earth project, which has apparently been running since 2011, although this is the first time we have heard of it. One of the aims of the project is to find a way of standardising how our robotic friends view the world of humans.
It is believed that self driving cars, drones and robots which need to do a lot of calculations could find this new approach especially useful to them.
