Sweet teeth are being indulged at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where a PR2 robot is said to bake cookies. Mario Bollini and Daniela Rus of the Distributed Robotics Lab at MIT have programmed the robot to make a giant cookie from scratch.
Cookie-baking robot!
The PR2 robot which is manufactured by the Willow Garage robotics company has been programmed to make dough, shape it like a giant cookie and then bake it in an oven. They are calling it the ‘BakeBot’. There is one catch, for you to own a cookie baking robot you will have to shell out a cool $400,000.
In the month of June the researchers had programmed the PR2 robot to stock a shopping cart with grocery products. In another related adventure they have taught the robot to mix a bowl if ingredients to make breakfast as well. They have also been known to teach it to fold clothes, and fetch beers.
BakeBot is unlike the robotics factory automation process that handles mass production. It is not an assembly line robot either it has many more skills. It uses visual recognition software and internal scales to find and measure ingredients in a room. BakeBot even uses a spatula to scrape the last bits of dough from its mixing bowl into the cookie pan. It is shifting towards the kind of personal robotic assistant that the Jetsons had in Rosie.