German robotics researchers provide free access to robot AI
Professor Michael Beetz, one of Germany's most renowned robotics researchers, and his team at Bremen University launched ‘openEASE‘, an open access knowledge database for robots. He invites fellow researchers to join him and add their robots' abilities to the free RobotWiki in order to make artificial intelligence (AI) research more responsible, trustworthy and faster.
So far, AI has been a closed shop – dominated by corporate interests. Hence, so far, great ideas from individual researchers went unnoticed far too often. The open platform ‘openEASE’ enables robots around the world to link up on line to share their knowledge on motion sequences and specific skills within minutes.
Furthermore, Beetz and his team have created an outreach initiative called TransAIR which aims to promote open AI-based robotics including open science, open source, open data and citizen science in the US. This includes transatlantic research opportunities for US scientists as well as fostering inspiring dialogues to discuss current perspectives and research approaches in the US and Germany.
In his exclusive Q&A Prof Beetz shares further insights into
- why it is crucial to democratise AI
- how researchers and programmers benefit from uploading their codes and sharing research results on openEASE, and
- why he isn´t afraid that his open data could be misused.