Upcoming

July 2011
Third one-week workshop
The third full week workshop, in which all partners of the RoboEarth project will get to gether for the next step in the integration of RoboEarth, will take mid 2011.

Past Workshops and Events

February 2011
Industrial Advisory Committee workshop
An international committee has been formed to have a direct link to the industrial world. This committee consists of representatives of leading industries world wide. On February 7-8, 2011, a dedicated workshop has been organized at the ETH in Zurich, with the following objectives:
Transfer of (long term) industrial requirements to the project.
Transfer of new scientific knowledge from the RoboEarth project to industry.
Exploring opportunities for implementation of the project results.

January 2011
Second internal workshop: Taking it to the next level
The second RoboEarth workshop took place from January 24th to 28th in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The goal, which was successfully achieved, was to use the AMIGO robot, that was built at the Technical University of Eindhoven, to serve a drink to a patient in a hospital room environment. Therefore the robot should benefit from knowledge shared through RoboEarth.

The robot itself only had certain basic skills like navigation, moving its arms or using the grippers. These so called action primitives were addressed by corresponding items of a pre-shared action description, also known as action recipe, which was downloaded from RoboEarth by the robot. Starting from the mentioned basic skills, complex actions can be composed that are far beyond the initial capabilities of the robot. The robot's execution engine was responsible for translating the semantic descriptions into physical actions.

To deal with the challenge, the members of the RoboEarth team had to integrate their different software components and refine the interfaces between them. The time was also used for inspiring discussions and the exchange of views. Despite the amount of work that had to be done, there was some time left for amusement at the local bowling center, where the team could prove its sportiness.
The great outcome of this strenuous week is an indicator of what RoboEarth can do for robots. It excels at broadening their knowledge and capabilities and increasing their level of proficiency.

October 2010
IROS 2010 workshop - Towards a World Wide Web for Robots
The autonomous robotics community is starting to tackle more and more complex manipulation activities, such as doing household chores, in more and more realistic operating environments such as human working and living environments. One of the biggest challenges in such applications is the open-endedness of the task domains and the enormous amount of knowledge needed to achieve reliable task success. Luckily almost every robot has access to the World Wide Web, the world's largest knowledge and information source. read more…

September 2010
Networking session at ICT 2010, organized by CompanionAble project
The 27th of September, RoboEarth joint in a network session, organized by the CompanionAble project, at the ICT 2010. This session focussed on addressing issues of e-Inclusion-Companion-Robotics under the theme of user-led co-design,
integration and business models for exploitation of societally embraced Companion Robotics.

July 2010
Birth of RoboEarth workshop
The first RoboEarth workshop, the 'Birth of RoboEarth', took place from July 19th to 23rd 2010 in Eindhoven. All PhD students and several professors met to discuss and work on the initial RoboEarth implementation. Apart from intense work on integrating the different parts, the week also offered the opportunity to discuss interfaces between components, research challenges and future directions. But there were also relaxing moments, like a visit to the museum of the DAF trucks manufacturer, a lab tour through the mechanical department, and a joint dinner.

During the workshop, a first working system that uploaded and downloaded a recipe has been realized. Though the example scenarios, replaying a joystick-controlled trajectory and learning the path through a maze, are still rather trivial, this showed the general feasibility of the RoboEarth approach.

May 2010
ICRA 2010 workshop
At the ICRA 2010 workshop, held May 7 2010 in Anchorage, Alaska, the key players of the RoboEarth project introduced all main aspects of RoboEarth. Part 1 focussed on providing an insight into the potential of the approach, the anticipated challenges and ways of addressing them. In part 2 we had interactive group discussions with the participants around core topics and together highlighted opportunities for academia and industry. read more…

March 2010
Hightech Mechatronics 2010
RoboEarth presented itself with a plenary talk at the Hightech Mechatronics 2010 conference, March 25, Veldhoven, Netherlands.

January 2010
Kick-off meeting
On January, 11-12, 2010, the project started with a Kick-off meeting in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. All groups gathered for general project presentations, group discussions and a social get-together. The meeting already showed the great enthusiasm with which the project started off.