A group of five of Europe's top technical universities, together with technology conglomerate Royal Philips NV, are launching an open-source system dubbed "RoboEarth" on Jan 16, 2014. The heart of the mission is to accelerate the development of robots and robotic services via efficient communication with a network, or "cloud".

Amigo, a white robot the size of a person, uses information gathered by other robots to move towards a table to pick up a carton of milk and deliver it to an imaginary patient in a mock hospital room at the Technical University of Eindhoven, Netherlands, Wednesday Jan 15, 2014.[Photo / Image China]