RoboEarth - A World Wide Web for Robots

The latest issue of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (RAM) is dedicated to building a WWW for robots.

Our contribution entitled RoboEarth - A World Wide Web for Robots gives an overview of RoboEarth: Its overall architecture, all key components, the available interfaces and an in-depth look at the topics the RoboEarth team is currently working on.
The paper also summarizes the work done so far and describes RoboEarth's first three demonstrators.

Other contributions to this Special Issue highlight research that is intimately connected to RoboEarth's vision of creating an Internet for robots:

• Willow Garage's Matai Ciocarlie et al. describes a 3D object database that contains grasp points, which paves the way for linking a first simple Action Recipe to grasp and pick up objects.
• Tenorth et al. propose an approach that allows robots to make use of information from the Web, such as instructions to perform everyday tasks or descriptions of properties and the appearance of objects. The authors propose techniques to translate the information from human-readable form into representations the robot can use.
• A contribution by Daniel Roggen et al. discusses methods for the automatic detection of actions in the wearable computing community, which provide valuable hints for RoboEarth's Action and Situation Recognition and Labeling component.
• Mozos et al. address the problem of exploiting the structure in today's designed workplace interiors as an example for how future object model Web databases can be used by service robots to add semantics to their sensors' readings and to build models of their environment.
• Blake et al. introduce both developmental and operational paradigms, whereas robots can be outfitted with Web-oriented software interfaces that give them access to universally standard Web resources. A case study is performed to investigate and demonstrate the conversion of traditional robotic data exchange for communicating with web services.

It is exciting to see so many common efforts being made in the robotics community, and we hope that this Special Issue and our contribution will inspire many more researchers to work towards making the WWW for robots a reality.