The robots are watching us...and learning.

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As of July, the internet contained some 3.32 billion indexed pages. It's a pretty massive place and, while much of it is taken up with pictures of kittens and other less elucidating material, you can also hit up the net any time you want to learn a new skill; swing dancing, for instance, or how to open a champagne bottle with a sword.

And, as it turns out, it may also be a good way to teach a robot tasks and recognition. Last month, Cornell University turned on its Robo Brain project, described as "a large-scale computational system that learns from publicly available internet resources, computer simulations, and real-life robot trials".

Even as you read these words, the robot is in the process of downloading one billion images, 120,000 YouTube videos and 100 million how-to documents and appliance manuals, as well as previous training Cornell researchers gave to other robots in their laboratories. By studying these materials, the Robo Brain will learn how to recognise objects and how they are used, as well as human language and behaviour -- and it will be able to pass this knowledge on to other robots.

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