The RoboEarth Project and The Rise Of The Machines

The field of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence seems to have been making significant progress these last couple of years. A few months ago, IBM's Watson supercomputer was able to beat the two best human players at Jeopardy. It is capable of understanding questions formulated in normal English language on a variety of fields like science, history or popular culture, and come up with an answer in less than a second.

The computer didn't 'google' any of the answers, it has all that information on its own database. Watching Watson play Jeopardy was strangely freaky, I felt like I was looking at HAL 9000 from '2001, a space odyssey'. Definitely the closest thing to Artificial Intelligence I've ever seen.

A couple years ago, a company called Boston Robotics perfected a two-legged robot called Petman that can walk just like a human being, using a natural toe-to-heel motion. The robot is capable of re-gaining balance when kicked. Very impressive.



Then more recently in February, NASA sent a humanoid helper robot called Robonaut to the International Space Station.

NASA's Robonaut

This robot mimics the human body from the waist up and has amazing hand-dexterity, being able to accomplish any manual task a human would normally do, like assembly stuff in space, or carrying things around.

Last summer, South Korea deployed the first fully autonomous gun turrets on their border with North Korea. These machine guns, developed by Samsung are programmed to automatically detect an shoot down any intruder through the heavily defended DMZ.

There are many other examples of robots perfecting their skills in very specific areas, like robot surgeons or semi-autonomous Air Force Drones. Most of those are not particularly frightening because even if they are really good at what they do, they can only do one thing. Watson cannot walk, Robonaut cannot play jeopardy and Petman cannot fly an airplane. The real threat to us weak humans will come when robots will start to learn from other fellow robots how to do all these specific tasks, and consolidate all those skills into a single machine. And that is exactly what Engineers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology are working on.

Their RoboEarth project aims at establishing a database that will let robots exchange information on how to best accomplish tasks. They designed a standard way of describing tasks so that they can be learned by other machines, and made this database accessible to them through the Internet. Robots will be able to download their own knowledge into the Database. Engineers are also working on standardizing the way objects are described, say for instance how to recognize a chair or a door. The DataBase will also contains maps, and presumable how to use those maps to navigate from point A to point B.

The purpose of this RoboEarth system is of course to save time and money to robot designers so that they don't have to re-invent the wheel. You're not going to see robots sneak out at night and download instructions on how to strangle their masters... yet. But it is the first step towards a system that will greatly facilitate and accelerate the development of increasingly smart and human-like robots. All the elements for amazingly capable robots are here, we just need to put all the pieces together.

Now, if you put Petman's legs and Watson's brain on Robonaut, give him a Korean auto-gun and asked him, "Robot! Go fetch me my slippers!", I would run for the nearest nuclear shelter and wait for Sarah Connor to come save me.