It (or he/she?) doesn’t need to, there is now a platform to connect to others. I wouldn’t call it the Facebook for Robots, it’s more like a giant Academia 🙂 but RoboEarth enable robots to share their experiences, their learnings. It is a Cloud environment that allows them also to use external storage and computation capabilities, that means freeing them of physically carrying the extra kilos of storage space or processor needed to execute their tasks.
See the official definition:
What is RoboEarth?
At its core, RoboEarth is a World Wide Web for robots: a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behavior and their environment. Bringing a new meaning to the phrase “experience is the best teacher”, the goal of RoboEarth is to allow robotic systems to benefit from the experience of other robots, paving the way for rapid advances in machine cognition and behaviour, and ultimately, for more subtle and sophisticated human-machine interaction.
RoboEarth offers a Cloud Robotics infrastructure, which includes everything needed to close the loop from robot to the cloud and back to the robot. RoboEarth’s World-Wide-Web style database stores knowledge generated by humans – and robots – in a machine-readable format. Data stored in the RoboEarth knowledge base include software components, maps for navigation (e.g., object locations, world models), task knowledge (e.g., action recipes, manipulation strategies), and object recognition models (e.g., images, object models).
I think this platform will make an exponential leap on robots capabilities. It is sometimes hard for humans to learn by example, but it is not so for robots.
And isn’t this like crowdsourcing between robots?
