For the first time a robot on the TU/e served a pack of juice to a patient without being programmed for it. According to René van de Molengraft, researcher in the Control Systems Technology Group at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, it is a breakthrough in robotic technology. The breakthrough is the result of collaboration between six European universities, led by TU/e. They are developing an Internet for robots; a kind of online database from which robots can download instructions and to which they can upload “experience.” It is the first system to allow robots to download their instructions from the Internet. Using RoboEarth, robots could learn how to do things better, pushing machine learning to new places and enhance human-machine interaction.

WWW for robots
The serving of the pack of juice pack was the result of a one week workshop in which the whole international project team was present. The project team includes researchers from TU/e and the universities of Munich, Stuttgart, Zaragoza and Zurich and Philips Applied Technologies. It took several days before the robot downloaded its instructions, but Thursday night it succeeded. The robot downloaded its instructions from RoboEarth. This is a World-Wide-Web style database filled with images and object models to enable object recognition, maps and world models to aid navigation, manipulation strategies for completing tasks that require dexterity, and other bits of information that contribute to artificial intelligence.

Share information
One of the goals of the project is to eventually get robots to "autonomously carry out useful tasks that were not explicitly planned for at design time." In other words: make robots smarter so they can do things we didn't know they could do. The RoboEarth database will allow robots to share information and learn from each other. As robots carry out tasks and compile feedback about them, they upload what they've learned or relevant data about the task or the immediate environment to their worldwide web. That information then becomes available to other robots, who can use it to improve their own functions and performance. The RoboEarth project started in January 2010 and has received multi-year funding from the European Commission's Cognitive Systems and Robotics Initiative. Serving a glass of water is one of the three demos that the project has planned. Another demonstration will show how the knowledge of robot A improves the performance of robot B.