Social networking for robots to share knowledge, skills and know-how

A major bottleneck in robotics research and development is the difficulty and time required to develop and implement new skills for robots to realize task-independence. In spite of work done in terms of task model transfer among robots, so far little work has been done on how to make robots task-independent. In this paper, we describe our work-in-progress towards the development of a robot social network called Numbots that draws on the principle of sharing information in human social networking. We demonstrate how Numbots has the potential to assist knowledge sharing, know-how and skill transfer among robots to realize task-independence. © 2012 Springer-Verlag