RoboEarth

A Web for Robots.  Have also investigated the same kind of idea for retail spaces, and not for robotics

The Internet has revolutionized how people produce, consume, and share information. Now imagine the same thing happening for robots. What if robots could access a worldwide open platform where they’d encode, exchange, and reuse knowledge to help each other accomplish complex tasks? That’s the goal of RoboEarth, an ambitious robotics project involving several universities and companies in Europe. IEEE Spectrum contributor Markus Waibel, a member of the project, describes how RoboEarth is working to build an “Internet for robots.” Is this how robots will finally get smarter—by learning not from us but rather from each other? ... The project is set up to deliver a proof of concept to show two things:

•RoboEarth greatly speeds up robot learning and adaptation in complex tasks.

•Robots using RoboEarth can execute tasks that were not explicitly planned for at design time.

The vision behind RoboEarth is much larger: Allow robots to encode, exchange, and reuse knowledge to help each other accomplish complex tasks. This goes beyond merely allowing robots to communicate via the Internet, outsourcing computation to the cloud, or linked data .... "