Cloud robotics are enabling robots to access large amounts of computing power that their bodies do not have the physical space to accommodate. Hundreds if not tens of thousands of servers are potentially at the service of small robots which can be in remote locations well away from the nearest supercomputer or data centre, only being connected by, for example, Wi-Fi or Ethernet.
This allows robots to call on powerful, cloud-based applications, such as speech recognition and language, when they are interacting with their users.
At the moment, most cloud robotics systems are linked to specific robots. So, for example, SoftBank’s Pepper robot is linked to the cloud robotics artificial intelligence system developed by Cocoro, another SoftBank company.
Pepper has about 25 onboard sensors to collect a wide range of information – sight, sound, touch and movement. That covers three of the five senses that human beings generally use, the two missing are taste and smell.
Pepper can be connected to the internet through Wi-Fi or Ethernet, both of which are incorporated into the robot. [Read more…] about Cloud robotics: Talking cloud and saying nothing