Outsource Your Chores Through a Robot Via the Heaphy Project

When we think about cloud robotics, we understand it consist of off-loading the computationally intensive tasks from a robot to a more powerful external resource that will process the data and send an answer or instructions on what to do back to the robot. We usually envision this computational outsourcing to be done by powerful server farms, but Tim Field from Willow Garage has a different idea and devised a system to allow these complex tasks to be offloaded to other humans. The Heaphy Project allows humans to help ROS-enabled robots perform complex tasks via teleoperation. This means that if you need to empty your dryer, you could ask your robot to do it which, in turn, will hire a human to help him with the chore. This might seem a convoluted patch to follow in order to have humans perform chores but the long-term goal is to have robots learn these tasks from their human operators. The video bellow explains how this projects works and how you can get started teleoperating robots via the Amazon Mechanical Turk. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aqghgoeCWk Via The Globe and Mail