B21 Kitchen Robot Shares Cooking Tips With Other Bots
The B21 kitchen robot is a robotic chef with several advanced features; it can find its way around a specially equipped kitchen using the same tools you do and it can share what it knows with other robots.
The robot chef was developed at the Technical University of Munich; Michael Beetz is the team leader for development. Rather than learning opjects by shape (which is more difficult) it requires that tags using RFID technology be attached to each item. Some products are manufactured with embedded RFID tags anyway.
"If you want to interpret and understand everyday activities using vision data, it's very complicated, error-prone, and resource intensive," says Beetz. "If you do it with RFID tags, there is very little sensor information, but it's highly correlated with the activities you are performing.”
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this robot is that, once it learns how to use an object, it can share this knowledge with other robots.
(B21 kitchen robot visualization)
This capability has been illustrated in mainstream science fiction movies. In the 2003 film I, Robot, the most advanced robots, the NS5's, had a special feature: additional software and instructions could be downloaded wirelessly to individual robots. NS5's receiving a download show a red glow in the chest cavity.
(Middle NS5 Robot Gets A Download)
In his 1943 short story Robinc, Anthony Boucher goes the other way. Rather than teaching a robot to use tools, why not create a robot that is the tool:
"Half your time in cooking is wasted raching around for what you need next. We can build in a lot of that stuff. For instance, one tentacle can be a registering thermometer. tapering to a find point - stick it in a roast and - One can end in a broad spoon for stirring - heat resistant, of course.
(Read more about Boucher's robot chef)
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