If you’re like me, you’d love some robot to prepare your breakfast, kind of like those crazy machines from Back to the Future. While today’s robots are certainly smarter than Doc Brown’s jury-rigged breakfast maker, you might wonder how good the robot breakfast will be. From what I can see, robot butlers and maids aren’t too far off.
This project was led by Dr. Michael Beets and Dr. Bernd Radig, part of a team or researchers in the IAS group at Germany’s Technical University in Munich. The robots they created actually go shopping and prepare a traditional Bavarian breakfast. Two robots were created for this project, TUM-James and TUM-Rosie. TUM-James takes care of the shopping while TUM-Rosie does the cooking. TUM-Rosie can boil sausages, skim them out and serve them. TUM-James can cut some baguettes for you. These ‘bots learn from doing, so sure enough, we’ll have Skynet (or a robotic Denny’s) on our hands soon.
The ‘bots use MS Kinect sensors as their vision, and the robots can make logical decisions when handling materials that they are unfamiliar with. Hopefully, at some point, they’ll be making a fruit salad or some eggs to go with the sausages.
[IEEE Spectrum via Designboom]
