ROBOTSHARE: A GOOGLE FOR ROBOTS
XIUYI FAN, Thomas C. Henderson · International Journal of Humanoid Robotics · 2008
Knowledge representation is a traditional field in artificial intelligence. Researchers have developed various ways to represent and share information among intelligent agents. Agents that share resources, data, information, and knowledge perform better than agents working alone. However, previous research has also revealed that sharing knowledge among a large number of entities in an open environment is a problem yet to be solved. Intelligent robots are designed and produced by different manufacturers. They have various physical attributes and employ different knowledge representations. Therefore, any nonstandard or non-widely-adopted technology is unsuitable for providing a satisfactory solution to the knowledge sharing problem. In this research, we pose robot knowledge sharing as an activity to be developed in an open environment — the World Wide Web. Just as search engines like Google provide enormous power for information exchange and sharing for humans, we believe that a searching mechanism designed for intelligent agents can provide a robust approach to sharing knowledge among robots. We have developed: (1) a knowledge representation for robots that allows Internet access, (2) a knowledge organization and search indexing engine, and (3) a query/reply mechanism between robots and the search engine.