The best scientists and engineers in the EU and Japan have joined forces to build a central repository for robot software that will allow individual robots to offload heavy computational, storage, and analysis to data centers and rapidly upgrade their own operations through sharing with other robots and using the resources of the data center.
The company
that is commercializing this technology is Rapyuta Robotics, based in Zurich,
Switzerland, and Tokyo, Japan.
The
Rapyuta software was originally developed by the RoboEarth project, sponsored by
the European Union.
Right now,
the company is concentrating on developing robot sentries, ground-based and
aerial, for security purposes. It plans
to expand into inspection services, but says it plans to go far beyond that.
Their team consists of world-class experts in a synergistic combination of disciplines.
Using this
system, Uber could coordinate the operations of its fleet of self-driving cars,
and the cars would benefit from learning everything that every other car has
learned and is learning. The same goes
for self-driving trucks and who-knows-what-other new forms robots and AI may
take.
Everything
about routes, traffic congestion, and everything known online about the passengers
they are shuttling about, from their credit-worthiness to their preferences in
music and video would be available to the robot car..
“Welcome
back, Honored Guest,” the machine will say.
“We noticed you had some complaints about your last ride/stay/meal/book/video. We’ve taken your views into account and have
addressed the issues of concern to you.
Please accept our apologies for our previous failures. We will continue to work to satisfy your
every need, and, if possible, your every whim.”
With
temperature and humidity sensors, and cameras, in the interior of the trucks,
the condition and security of the products being shipped could be collected by
the robot truck, uploaded to the data center, and provided as needed to those
with a need to know. UPS and FedEx
already do this, enabling you to remotely track your shipment from any Internet connection.
One might
well ask if there is there a “cloud robotics”-gap. Where is the United States in developing comparable
technology? No doubt the Department of
Defense is developing, or has developed, systems for the simultaneous
coordination of drones, but is it equally robust as the RoboEarth/Rapyuta-based
system being developed by the Swiss-Japanese company?
As the
robots’ sensors channel real-time data to the Rapyuta data center, big data and
analytic software can constantly analyze it, and update the distributed robots
with better information for them to use in their operations. This would create a massively-parallel recursively
self-improving entity that could eventually evolve into something beyond its
creators original intentions. Or maybe
into exactly what they originally conceived.
The core Rapyuta
software is open source, maintained and enhanced by the team at Rapyuta
Robotics, who will be using this open source Platform-as-a-Service to power
their specific security and inspection products and services. With the combined skills of the best
engineers in Europe and Japan, the only question now is when we can see these
systems in action.
That
question has been posed by Etopia News to Rapyuta Robotics. Stay tuned for further news.
For additional information about the origins and status of Rapyuta Robotics, click here.
There's more at: Rapyuta, the Group Mind for Robots That May Yet Send Arnold Schwarzenegger Back in Time to Kill Us All.
Rapyuta as a precursor, or kernel, for Skynet, is also a theme in Rapyuta Is A Hive Mind For Robots In The Cloud.
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