Let the robot race begin.
Expectations are high for RoboEarth, a European-funded system to speed the development of human-serving robots.
Scientists from five major European technical universities have gathered in the Netherlands this week for its launch and to demonstrate possible applications.
The first: the deceptively simple task of delivering a glass of milk to a patient in a mock-up hospital room.
The system is sometimes billed as a kind of Wikipedia for robots, allowing them - or their programmers - to turn to it for information.
In a demonstration this week at Eindhoven University of Technology, RoboEarth wirelessly instructed a waste-bin-sized robot called "Avi" to scan a room's physical layout, including the location of the patient's bed and the placement of a carton of milk on a table nearby.
Then the system activated a second robot, the more humanoid "Amigo," which used the map provided by Avi to locate the milk, grasp it with a pincer hand and bring it to the side of the hospital bed. That mission accomplished, he dropped it on the floor.
Fortunately, it was a test run and no milk was spilled.
Organisers say the tasks are of a technological sophistication comparable with those performed by high-end robots in automobile factories - they just look clumsier because robots that interact with humans are not performing repetitive tasks in the controlled, sanitised and predictable surroundings of a factory.
Designers of robots can add information to the system, which is then shared for free so others don't have to reinvent the electric wheel.
But RoboEarth is more than an encyclopedia. It has a system of networked computers that allow it to perform intensive computing tasks that smaller computers - or in this case simpler robots - may not be able to. It also allows individual robots to communicate between themselves, the so-called RoboCloud of networked computers, and the robot database.
"The future in robotics and especially cloud computing is very exciting," said Gajan Mohanaraja, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich, which is taking part in the project.
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