Exchanging Action-Related Information among Autonomous Robots

In this paper, we describe representations and inference techniques that are used in the RoboEarth system for the web-based exchange of information between robots. We present novel representations for environment maps that combine expressive semantic environment models with techniques for selecting suitable maps from the web-based RoboEarth knowledge base. We further propose techniques for improving class-level object models with additional information as needed for distributed learning of object properties. In an integrated experiment, we show that the system enables robots to perform mobile manipulation tasks including the retrieval of suitable environment maps and the estimation and exchange of object property information.