Robots Now Have A Cloud-Based Internet, Because Dammit
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“Remember when there was a time without all these blasted robots?” You’ll ask, receiving no response since everyone you know will have been replaced by robots. If nothing is scarier to you than intelligent robots, this next story is going to bring you night terrors.
It hasn’t been that long since cloud computing and cloud storage revolutionized networking and remote storage, but robots now have that same capability, as the Rapyuta launches globally. Rapyuta, which takes its name from Hayao Miyazaki’s animated masterpiece Castle in the Sky, is a web-based data network that more or less serves as an expansive how-to guide on doing just about anything that robots can do. The robot doesn’t even have to be intelligent anymore since any bit of information it needs is right at its grubby, metal fingertips.
Say a bot needed to clean all the windows on the Empire State Building. Somebody somewhere input the information detailing the number of windows on the skyscraper, and the size of each, and the robot will know exactly the area of the windows it’ll be cleaning. The same goes for it frying an egg, putting together a model airplane, or reattaching a muffler. If the information is out there, the robot can retrieve it, and since the information won’t be a part of the robot’s circuitry, this will free up memory storage and be a much cheaper alternative to loading them up with tons of digital information and processors to make all that info functional.
The Raptuya database began as part of the European Robo Earth project in 2011. The technical project head at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Mohanarajah Gojamohan, is optimistic for the technology to be used in drones, self-driving cars, and other mobile robots required to perform complicated computations on a regular basis. At this point, it looks like wireless speeds will be the sliding scale as far as how widespread and fast the Raptuya database can perform.
If the developers are smart, they’ll set the robots to perform a failsafe task where they repeat Travis Bickle’s mirror speech from Taxi Driver if anyone asks them how they can be destroyed.
