Robo Brain is designed to acquire a vast range of skills and knowledge from publicly available information sources such as YouTube. The information it learns can then be accessed by robots around the world, helping them to perform everyday tasks. A similar project is already being developed in Europe.
RoboEarth, described as a world wide web for robots, was demonstrated by researchers at Eindhoven University in the Netherlands in January. Like Robo Brain, it aims to become a global repository for information that can be accessed by other robots. But unlike RoboEarth, Robo Brain is able to build up its own understanding from the information it gets from the internet, rather than being programmed by humans. The project is the result of a collaboration between the US universities of Cornell, Brown, Stanford and California, and has support from companies including Google and Microsoft.