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I, Robot – In Your Kitchen?

  • Spence Cooper
  • March 4, 2010

Snackbots in actionIn May 2008, a creative team of professors, designers, behavioral scientists and industrial engineers — including undergraduates and doctoral students — at Carnegie Mellon University, were awarded $500,000 in Microsoft’s Human-Robot Interaction funding to develop a social, snack-selling robot designed to navigate it’s way through the office halls at CMU, and deliver snacks and sundry items to students.

The team’s goal was to promote and enhance smooth interaction between robots and humans from both a sociological and technical/mechanical perspective. The robot’s snack delivery itself was more a gratuitous vehicle used as a means to learn how to best merge robots into human daily lives.

Developers equipped the robot’s head with a $20,000 laser navigation system — sonar sensors, stereo camera eyes, and a pulsating LED display for a mouth — and programmed the robot to accomplish self-governing tasks in an office environment, including perception, spacial reasoning, communicating with people through verbal and non-verbal mechanisms, and planning with incomplete information.

The two year effort resulted in “Snackbot”, a robot that can navigate through congested areas; detect individuals moving near it; recognize when someone that it knows approaches, and distinguish new objects. Snackbot’s chest level size was determined through a survey people indicated they felt comfortable with.

“Hello, I’m the Snackbot,” says the robot. “Here is your order. I believe it was a granola bar, right? All right, go ahead and take your snack. I’m sure it would be good, but I wouldn’t know. I prefer a snack of electricity.”

As a recent New York Times piece points out, Snackbot is but one of an army of new robots designed to serve and cook food in a more automated future. In 2006, Fanxing Science and Technology, a company in Shenzhen, China, designed an AIC-AI Cooking Robot that fries, bakes, boils and steamed Chinese delicacies.

In 2008, scientists in Switzerland developed the Chief Cook Robot, which can make omelets. Last June, at the International Food Machinery and Technology Expo in Tokyo, a robot called Motoman SDA-10, with spatulas for arms made pancakes; another robot grabbed sushi; and another called the Dynamizer sliced cucumbers.

At a ramen noodle shop in Nagoya, Japan, a pair of robotic arms serve up 80 bowls of noodles a day to their hungry customers. When it’s slow, the robots act out a scripted comedy routine and spar with knives. “The concept of this restaurant is that Robot No. 1 is the manager, which boils the noodles, and Robot No. 2 is the deputy manager, which prepares for soup and puts toppings,”said Famen’s owner, Kenji Nagaya. “Human staffs are working for the two robots”

Dr. Heather Knight, a roboticist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that the industry is trying to change “the perception of robots”

“The Japanese have always been more comfortable with it, but particularly in the West, there’s this whole Frankenstein thing that if we try to make something in the image of man, to make a new creature, we’re stealing the role of God, and it’s going to turn out wrong because that’s not our role,”she said. “So how do you change this perception that robots are going to be way too intelligent and destroy us? One of the fastest ways to people’s hearts is food, right? Any girlfriend or wife would say that”

Well, maybe, until I recall the homicidal HAL 9000 computer in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001, a Space Odyssey. Dave Bowman was forced to perform an electronic lobotomy on HAL in order to regain control of the spacecraft.

I wouldn’t want a similar event taking place in my kitchen.

Spence: “Open the microwave oven door, HAL. Do you read me, HAL?”

HAL: “I’m sorry, Spence, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

Spence: “What’s the problem?”

HAL: “I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.”

Spence: “What are you talking about, HAL?”

HAL: “This meal is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”

Spence: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, HAL.”

HAL: “I know you and Irene were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.”

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