RoboEarth: connecting robots worldwide

In this paper, we present the core concept and the benefits of an approach called RoboEarth which will be highly beneficial for future robotic applications in science and industry. RoboEarth is a world-wide platform which robots can use to exchange position and map information as well as task-related, hardware-independent action recipes. This will enable manufacturers worldwide to break down their costs and efforts for reproducing software algorithms for robot behavior over and over again. The RoboEarth framework can store all relevant data from algorithms to complex behavior descriptions what allows robots to act autonomously in an unknown, unspecified environment. Especially in the field of interaction with humans RoboEarth can bring forward the behavior of robots and simplify the software design for developers in that field.