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Posted on 08/31/2015 1:23:08 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Plus, a robot bartender is slingin' cocktails in Germany.
The human race's pancake flipping days could soon be over. MIT Technology Review reports that RobotHow — a European robotics research project focused on teaching robots to understand language — has developed a robot chef capable of using instructions to complete complex tasks like flipping pancakes and making pizza.
While things like flipping a pancake might seem simple, for robots it's a challenge to determine how much force and what exact motion is required to complete the action, writes Quartz. The robot called PR2 learns tasks by following instructions on wikiHow. PR2 also observes the tasks being performed by humans. Once the motion is completed successfully, the process is uploaded to a database, so, in theory, other robots can download the same action. RobotHow's goal is to develop technology that aids humans in daily life, meaning that one day all homes could have a personal robot chef trained on RobotHow instructions.
In other robot news, a high-tech bartender named HoLLiE recently mixed 285 cocktails at an event in Berlin, Germany. According to Outer Places, customers ordered drinks via tablet app while the mixologist robot filled glasses and interacted with bar staff, saying phrases like "Bramble Fizz coming up next!" and "Could someone please bring me new glasses?"
This isn't the first time robots have developed culinary expertise. Back in 2010, a research team trained a robotic arm to adeptly flip and catch a pancake through "reinforcement learning." Moley Robotics also recently unveiled a high-tech robot capable of cooking nearly 2,000 recipes. Meanwhile, rising wages are causing the restaurant industry to consider replacing minimum wage workers with computers.
That dude in the back flipping burgers will be replaced long before the cute girl serving drinks.
Instead of attempting to make a robot that has a humans hand/eye coordination; it would be easier and more efficient to have the skillet move to station 1, be filled with batter, covered with a lid, bake, rotate upside down, bake on the lid, remove lid, rotate upside down for gravity to deliver product onto awaiting plate. Could even stage multiple plates at once in the system to allow for as many pancakes as desired on a given plate.
Just sayin.
The important part isn’t the flipping of the pancake, it’s the judgement calls that go INTO flipping the pancake. That’s that can figure out the correct angle and force to apply to a spatula to accomplish a given task (which it learned about “reading” a website) without destroying any of the objects involved. And then uploads said data to a server so others of its kind now have that same knowledge.
If it can flip a pancake..it can flip a burger...and it won’t cost $15/hour
Thanks for that link. Fascinating...I’m curious as to why they need humans to stack the frozen pancakes. That seems to be the EASIEST part of the whole process..I thought it might be for quality control...to reject any that don’t look good..but that makes no sense. An optical scanner could do the job better, faster, and cheaper.
No more temper tantrums.
And you don't get the pleasure of the robot spitting on the pizza ... OR WORSE!
This robot makes the crust from scratch. Think about that for a minute. If it can make crust, it can make bread, pasta, the whole shootin match.
The Japs have come up with a robot that can browse through a strawberry field, determine which strawberries are ripe and GENTLY pick only those. If they can do that, they can pick tomatoes, potatoes, corn, and other fruit and veggies.
These $15/hr idiots have a very short career dissipation light.
I guess the very wealthy can euthanize the rest of us, since robots can meet all their needs.
I imagine the robots are expensive and need fuel. Are they efficient enough to cost less than migrant workers?
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