Alexander Perzylo

RoboEarth meets the Internet of Things (IoT) at the PICNIC Festival in Amsterdam (Update)

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At this year's PICNIC Festival in Amsterdam, RoboEarth held a joint workshop on Robots and the Internet of Things (IoT) with Council, a think tank part of the High Level Expert Group (EG IoT) on the Internet of Things of the European Commission.

The event met with unexpectedly high attendance, resulting in a room packed with an interested and engaged audience and resulting in lively discussion and debate. The main topics centered on how robots could enrich our lives through the Internet and the challenges both communities face to make a vision where the Internet gets hands through robots, and robots greatly benefit from the Internet become a reality.

As the chairman Rob van Kranenburg introduced: 'Rather than programming robots to handle every potential situation, the Internet of Things could create an environment in which the objects themselves inform robots of their purpose and usage. Tomorrow's smart objects can provide sensing, robots can act, processing can be on the robot or in the Cloud. To accomplish this, the fields of robotics and IoT need to define common standards for knowledge storage, representation and communication.'

The topics of debate had clear connection points, and pointed to potential future research questions for RoboEarth, including:

  • Tomorrow's smart objects can provide sensing, robots can act, processing can be on the robot or in the Cloud (e.g., using RoboEarth's Cloud Engine)
  • Rather than programming robots to handle every potential situation, the Internet of Things could create an environment in which the objects themselves inform robots of their purpose and usage.
  • Both the IoT and RoboEarth encode knowledge. The fields of robotics and IoT need to define common standards for knowledge storage and representation.
  • The IoT, robots, and humans need to communicate. The fields of robotics and IoT need to define interfaces and common standards for communication.

For more information, have a look at the article Enlisting Robots - Once robots are integrated into the Internet of Things, they can perform tasks automatically published in the RFID Journal.

Update (Feb 27, 2013):
Even more information can be found in the article The Internet of Things: Robots, RFID & Co-operation published in the December 2012 issue of Elektor.

Alexander Perzylo

European Robotics Week 2011 (Update)

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Update (Jan 05, 2012):
More than 100 people joined the introduction to RoboEarth and the interactive workshops. They created and detected their first 3D object models using the RoboEarth platform. We want to thank everyone who helped to organize the successfull event as well as all participants who showed their interest.

euRobotics Week

RoboEarth will present itself as part of the European Robotics Week from November 28th - December 4th, 2011.
Therefore the RoboEarth team will set up a live webcast on Friday, December 2nd, 2011, starting from 15.00 (CET).

Dr. Oliver Zweigle is going to present a brief introduction to the concepts of RoboEarth. Subsequently, an interactive workshop will be held. The aim for the workshop is to let anyone interested try out the RoboEarth software to build 3D object models themselves and use them to detect the described objects.

The workshop's prerequisites and details on how to register can be found at webcast. Registration will be open until November 20th, 2011. The webcast itself will also be made available through this website.

Alexander Perzylo

RoboEarth at IROS 2011

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Members of the RoboEarth team contributed seven papers to the IROS'11 conference, which took place in San Francisco (USA) from September 25-30th. In addition, RoboEarth supported a workshop on Knowledge Representation for Autonomous Robots.

During the workshop Jos Elfring gave an introduction to RoboEarth's approach to world modelling. It uses a multiple hypothesis filter (MHF) to keep track of objects over time and introduces techniques to improve the probabilistic models by taking prior knowledge about objects into account, e.g. object dynamics, expected locations, relations between object classes and detector characteristics. For more details on this topic take a look at the corresponding paper, Knowledge-Driven World Modeling.

Other papers presented during the regular paper sessions were:

Alexander Perzylo

Networking session at ICT 2010

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The 27th of September, RoboEarth joint in a networking session, organized by the CompanionAble project, at the ICT 2010. This session focused 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.

Alexander Perzylo

RoboCup German Open 2010

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At the RoboCup German Open in Magdeburg 2010, the RoboCup team 1. RFC Stuttgart from the University of Stuttgart and the Tribots from the University of Freiburg, both former World Champions, made a joint effort to share knowledge between their different robot systems, which participated in RoboCup's Middle-Size League (MSL).

1.RFC Stuttgart Bot

This was a first approach of cooperation between robots based on the RoboEarth principle. As soon as the first release of the RoboEarth platform is finished, the prototypical database server will be replaced by the RoboEarth system. The RoboEarth concept could provide new impulses to the MSL and especially reduce the huge efforts needed for new teams to enter the MSL.

Alexander Perzylo

Kick-off meeting

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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.