Rapyuta, the RoboEarth Cloud Engine, is a Platform as a Service framework for robots. The figure on the left gives a simplified overview of the Rapyuta framework: Each robot connected to Rapyuta will have a secured computing environment (rectangular boxes) giving them the ability to move their heavy computation into the cloud. In addition, the computing environments are tightly interconnected with each other and have a high bandwidth connection to the RoboEarth knowledge repository (stacked circular disks).
European scientists have just launched Raptuya, an online database of information for robots, that helps robots cope in the world of humans. The Raptuya database is part of the European RoboEarth Project, a “World Wide Web for robots”. The project is designed so that robots can download information from the internet to learn about their environment, software components, objects and images, and also how to perform certain tasks.
The launch of Raptuya is the first phase of the RoboEarth project. With the help of Ratuya, robots don’t have to individually learn how to deal with objects and situations on their own. Raptuya will help speed up the process by downloading the necessary information to the robot via cloud networking. Raptuya will also help the robot do computation so that it can easily figure out how to navigate around, perform tasks, and recognize languages.
By having this online database for robots, scientists are hoping that the cost of robots will go down because there will be less reliance on on-board storage and computation. The information on the Raptuya database is provided by both robots, who upload their information into the database, and humans, who create information for the robots. All of the information is in a machine-readable format that is easily accessible to the robots.
RoboEarth is designed to lead the way for innovation for robots. It will also prove to be useful for drones, as well as self-driving cars. The scientists at Oxford University were looking for a way for their self-driving car system to be able to download information about their environment though the internet. It looks like they have their answer now. We may see life that has somewhat of a semblance to The Jetsons, with mobile robot servants becoming more affordable and being able to learn how to “fold an item of clothing and understand human speech.”
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