Web-Enabled Robots

In this article, we describe and discuss the use of information that is available in the World Wide Web and intended for human use as a knowledge resource for autonomous service robots. To this end, we introduce several categories of Web sites that can serve as information sources and explain which kinds of information they provide. We then investigate several information processing methods that can access these Web sites to provide robots with necessary knowledge for performing everyday manipulation tasks. The use of the Web as a knowledge resource is a promising alternative to the hard and tedious task of coding comprehensive specific knowledge bases for robots.