Our project will start with a state-of-the-art review of existing technologies and standards. This becomes necessary since at this point in time a new robot is introduced almost weekly and even robotics researchers and developers often learn about them only from the public media. While many commercially available robots and research robots emerge at an increasing speed, several of them are only introduced in specific countries, such as Japan or the USA, and are not promoted or sold in any other country. It thus becomes increasingly difficult for the robotic community to maintain an overview, to gain in-depth insight, create communication standards or to make purchasing decisions. Even an internet search does not always result in sufficient information, since web pages of Japanese developers, for example, are often in Japanese only.
This lack of available information makes the development of tools and communication protocols difficult. It is not clear what the hardware and software of all those robots has to offer and hence its remains utmost difficult to define requirements for the development tools. If, for example, a certain library is introduced, but its function is only supported by a fraction of the available robots, then the effort of the development for this library might have been better spent otherwise. To make a good judgment on what aspects to focus, it is necessary to have detailed insights into the current market and research situation.
The first step to classify robots is to create a taxonomy and nomenclature that may be inspired by the Linnaean classification system. The robot taxonomy will define the criteria on which the classes and orders may be distinguished. Some first works on robot taxonomies are available [1,2] and will be examined for applicability. In order to guarantee that the taxonomy if future-proof, the most ambitious research initiatives will be studies and taken into account. Moreover, the taxonomy will have a built-in flexibility to allow for easy extension and reorganization. The robot taxonomy will then be applied to robots, starting with currently available robots and then extending to historical important robots, such as Aibo. Their data will be gathered in a web-based database, similar to a museum registration system [3].
The database is intended as an international community effort. The objective of this proposal is to compile an initial critical mass of data about robots and to establish a steady user community. This community is expected to sustain its future development, similar to the community that carries the Wikipedia. The robot database will, obviously, use the internet to maintain and present the information. It will be a starting point to collect and classify robots and furthermore be the base of the definition of standards.
That is because we are in the process of creating the website and, as you can imagine, it takes a while until things are completely operational. However, you can expect to see it up and running soon...
The institution involved in the creation of the robot database is Eindhoven University of Technology (www.tue.nl), coordinated through the Designed Intelligence Group (http://w3.id.tue.nl/en/research/designed_intelligence), a unit belonging to the Department of Industrial Design (http://w3.id.tue.nl/). If you want to contribute your ideas to the project, or simply know more about it, you can contact Dr. Christoph Bartneck (cbartneck 'at' tue 'dot' nl) or Alex Juarez (acordova 'at' tue 'dot' nl).
[1] A survey of socially interactive robots. Fong, T., Nourbakhsh, I. and Dautenhahn, K. In Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems Vol. 42, pp. 143-166, 2003.
[2] A taxonomy for human-robot interaction. Yanco, H. and Drury, J.AAAI Technical Report FS-02-03, pp. 111 – 119, AAAI Fall Symposium on Human-Robot Interaction, November 2002.
[3] The new museum registration methods. Buck, R.A. and Gilmore, J.A. American Association of Museums, 4th. Edition, 1998