For a robot to be able to wash clothes, vacuum carpets or serve you cocktails on a Friday night, it needs to be loaded with the appropriate software and data. In the future, though, a robot will easily be able pull info they need to do those things (and more) from a single online service called Robo Brain. Researchers, roboticists and companies, for instance, will be able to download whatever skill they want and then load it onto their creations. Robots already deployed to do their jobs, on the other hand, can go online to use the service and look up anything it comes across that it can’t recognize.
According to project lead Ashutosh Saxena from Cornell (the study’s a joint effort between Brown, Cornell and Stanford Universities as well as the University of California, Berkeley), his team’s goal is to “build a very good knowledge graph — or a knowledge base — for robots to use.” Think of Robo Brain as Wikipedia (without all the unsourced information) that robots can tap into when they need to understand how we speak and how we see the world — both extremely important if they are to organically perform their tasks.
via Engadget
