A Special Issue Toward a WWW for Robots [From the Guest Editors]

The autonomous robotics community is starting to tackle more complex manipulation activities, such as doing household chores, in more realistic operating environments such as human working and living environments. One of the biggest challenges in such applications is the open endedness of the task domains and the enormous amount of knowledge needed to achieve success for the reliable task. Luckily, almost every robot has access to the World Wide Web (WWW), the world's largest knowledge and information source.