MIT’s Fully-Functioning Robot Bartender Is Here To Serve Beer
There’s no doubt you’ve sat on your couch in need of another beer and wished you had someone get up and get it for you. There are other times when you’re at a jam-packed bar and it’s understaffed. You have to wait forever for the waitress/bartender to get you a beer. When the time comes when they finally come around, you have to order more than one beer so you don’t have to wait as long. That dreadful experience may be coming to end because some smart people decided to use their brains to solve the problem of slow beer delivery. Answer? ROBOTS!
MIT has a study that uses its PR2 bartender and the two Turtlebot waiters to transform their laboratory into a bar in order to “test” how well their robots perform.
How the process works is that the Turtlebot waiters will take orders from the people in the office. The Turtlebot waiters then place orders go back to the PR2 bartender robot to get the beer cans so that they can return with beer to the customers. It’s basically how a bar works, but with robots that don’t get hassled by guys trying to get their number.
One of the lead researchers behind the robot bartender study is Chris Amato, and he explains how the robots complete their tasks: “Each robot’s sensors get less-than-perfect information about the location and status of both themselves and the things around them. As for outcomes, a robot may drop items when trying to pick them up or take longer than expected to navigate.”
You can see more on how these Turtlebot and PR2 robots work together in the video below:
If you really want to learn the very specifics of how it works, check out this video they posted that shows how the robots react to problems that human bartenders and waiters have to deal with when they arise:
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Jeff Sorensen is an author, writer and occasional comedian living in Detroit, Michigan. You can look for more of his work on The Huffington Post,UPROXX,BGR and by just looking up his name.
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