A super-intelligent robotic "brain" that can learn new skills by browsing millions of web pages has been developed by US researchers. Robo Brain is designed to acquire a vast range of skills and knowledge from publicly available information sources such as YouTube. The information it learns can then be accessed by robots around the world, helping them to perform everyday tasks. A similar project is already being developed in Europe. RoboEarth, described as a world wide web for robots, was demonstrated by researchers at Eindhoven University in the Netherlands in January.

A world wide web for robots to learn from each other and share information is being shown off for the first time. Scientists behind RoboEarth will put it through its paces at Eindhoven University in a mocked-up hospital room. Four robots will use the system to complete a series of tasks, including serving drinks to patients. It is the culmination of a four-year project, funded by the European Union. The eventual aim is that both robots and humans will be able to upload information to the cloud-based database, which would act as a kind of common brain for machines.

Robots could soon have an equivalent of the internet and Wikipedia. European scientists have embarked on a project to let robots share and store what they discover about the world. Called RoboEarth it will be a place that robots can upload data to when they master a task, and ask for help in carrying out new ones. Researchers behind it hope it will allow robots to come into service more quickly, armed with a growing library of knowledge about their human masters. The idea behind RoboEarth is to develop methods that help robots encode, exchange and re-use knowledge, said RoboEarth researcher Dr Markus Waibel from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

I am currently one of about 30 people working towards building an Internet for robots: a world-wide, open-source platform that allows any robot with a network connection to generate, share and reuse data. RoboEarth's goal is a proof of concept to show two things: That RoboEarth greatly speeds up robot learning and adaptation in complex tasks, and that robots using RoboEarth can execute tasks that were not explicitly planned for at design time. The vision behind the four year, Europe-funded project is much larger: Allow robots to encode, exchange, and reuse knowledge to help each other accomplish complex tasks. This goes well beyond merely allowing robots to communicate via the Internet, outsourcing computation to the cloud, or linked data: Unlike humans, robots excel at systematic data collection, so a system that allows robots to autonomously create meaningful knowledge and share it could provide a powerful feed forward to any robot's 3D sensing, acting and learning capabilities. For more information, have a look at the RoboEarth website.