Rapyuta, Robot Brain.

Robots need processing power and in the current stage of robot technology, it is hard to carry all that processing power in one small robot head (or body). So European scientists have developed, what they hope will be a standard for online 'brains', where the robot in question is constantly consulting an online encyclopedia which contains information on objects it may encounter, speech and conversations of people and other information, from which it can learn to navigate its world. It is an important step in the development of robot technology in that it enables these machines, to go beyond their onboard capacity, when completing tasks.

The system was developed by European Robo Earth project, shared by five different European research labs. It utilises cloud computing. "The system could be particularly useful for drones, self-driving cars or other mobile robots who have to do a lot of number crunching just to get round", said Mohanarajah Gajamohan, technical head of the project at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

Learning speech and conversation from cloud computing technology would be an important part of any Internet Based AI, and this is part of what would be needed for computers and humans to take part in a conversational dialogue of any quality (see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21714191). The next step would be for more of the capacity to be stored on-board a robot, as computing technology gets smaller and more powerful.