Robots in today’s society can do all sorts of wonderful and inventive things to make our lives just a little bit better. But if they truly begin mastering making breakfast, well then its possible we’re all living inside a Jetsons episode.
We already do have a personal robot that can act as our own little androids to help us do day to day little tasks and we’ve also already brought you PR2, who has been programmed to bake cookies all on its own. Now it appears that the PR2 is branching out and has picked up a friend in order to help it whip up a tasty breakfast.
While PR2 may have actually perfected being able to make the cookies, his new partner is actually looking to take the next step when talking about robots preparing a meal. Rosie the robot (not quite the Jetson’s Rosie yet but getting there) has been trained by researchers at Munich’s Institute of Technology to cook a breakfast complete with Bavarian sausage. The researchers have built a complete kitchen that both Rosie and PR2 can move about using Xbox Kinect technology to visually recognize items that are spread around the kitchen.
Perhaps the most interesting part of these videos is how Rosie and the PR2, nicknamed James, work together to put the breakfast together. James will move around the room actually “shopping” for ingredients the two bots need in order to make a complete breakfast for their human oppressors creators. While James is fetching the ingredients, Rosie is busy using the Kinect type interface to recognize the bowls that she needs and measure the amount of water she needs to pour in order to make the best possible breakfast she can.
These particular advances are a far cry from the robots that just manage to grab a beer bottle or stir what has been put into a bowl for them. It seems like it won’t be long at all now that the robots will be able to be set on a task and then left to their own devices without even the minimal amount of human interaction.
