Utilizing external perception and intelligence in a networked robotic system

Contrary to limited local functions and machine intelligence of a single mobile robot, a networked mobile robot can utilize abundant resources over networks, especially the Internet that extend the network and robot applications to a new field. Potential online assistance from network might be computers, digital sensors, database, even operators. It is currently an important issue of the Internet-based robotic system and can often lead to significant improvement in machine intelligence and system performance. In this paper a new approach utilizing network resources is proposed for indoor applications of our Internet-based robotic system. Developed with this strategy, the robot, instead of only being considered as a passive remote tool, can actively seek for help from assistant network resources for perception or intelligence enhancement. The layered framework of the Internet-based robotic system is outlined as application background, and the definition, implementation and utilizing strategy of network resources based on OAA (open agent architecture) discussed, with two practical examples as speech recognition and global vision perception given to demonstrate the potential applications. Finally, the integration to the framework of the Intranet/Internet-based robotic system with the example utilizations is presented.