Willow Garage ‘service bots’ make pancakes
While science fiction in the form of cinema and literature has forecasted that household robots will soon become a part of our lives, it seems as if that has become a reality with two robots (James and Rosie) have demonstrated the ability to make decent pancakes.
According to a video by a Palo Alto company known as Willow Garage, two robots are shown working together to make pancakes from a mix, and even being able to flip the pancakes correctly, which has been quite a task in itself for these service bots to learn.
And the best part about this eight minute demo was that these sophisticated humanoid robots were able to make these pancakes right from a scratch, which involved the opening and closing of cupboards and drawers, the removal of the pancake mix (by James) from the refrigerator to the flipping of the finished pancakes, that was appreciated with applause by spectators.
While James has been designed by Willow Garage (costing about $ 400,000), Rosie is a robot from the Technical University Munich. Both robots are equipped with sophisticated equipment such as cameras, three-axis accelerometers, pressure sensor-arrays and laser range finders and scanners.
These robots were able to perform this task of making pancakes (which is considered a complex task for robots) due to their ability to exhibit characteristics such as probability inference, learning and action planning. This was aptly demonstrated in one of the robots using the internet to find cooking instructions and pictures for assistance as it was facing a cooking problem in making the pancakes.
And while Willow Garage researchers admit that James and Rosie aren’t yet ready to prepare meals that can be considered as ‘haute cuisine’, the success of this experiment indicates the endless possibilities for researchers and engineers ahead, even though it will still take a while for these robots to be a part of any household.