Too many robo cooks spoil the broth

Published on Saturday 6 March 2010 12:42

Scientists have now developed robots that can make omelettes, chop vegetables and serve up dinner, but it's not just about the food

IN an empty fluorescence-lit hallway on the second floor of Smith Hall, Carnegie Mellon University, in Pennsylvania, Dr Paul Rybski and a pair of students are showing off their most advanced creation.

The culmination of two years of research and the collective expertise of 17 faculty members, undergraduates and doctoral students in the Human Robot Interaction Group, it is a robot fitted with a 13,400 laser navigation system, sonar sensors and a Point Grey Bumblebee 2 stereo camera that functions as its eyes, staring out from its clay-coloured plastic, gender-neutral face.

With Dr Rybski looking on like a proud parent, a bearded graduate student clacks away at a laptop on a roving service cart, and the robot rolls forward to fulfil its primary function: the delivery of one foil-wrapped Nature Valley trail-mix flavour granola bar. "Hello, I'm the Snackbot," it says, in a voice not unlike that of Hal 9000, from 2001: A Space Odyssey, as its rectangular LED 'mouth' pulsates to form the words. "I've come to deliver snacks to Ian. Is Ian here?"

I respond affirmatively. "Oh, hello, Ian," it says. "Here is your order. I believe it was a granola bar, right?"

Yes, it was. "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."

Designed to gather information on how robots interact with people (and how to improve homo-robo relations), the Snackbot has been carefully considered for maximum approachability – in every detail, from height to colour. The snack, not surprisingly, is the central component of that approachability. "We figured, what better way to get people to interact with a robot than have something that offers them food," Dr Rybski says.

The Snackbot is but one soldier in a veritable army of new robots designed to serve and cook food and, in the process, act as good-will ambassadors and salesmen for a more automated future.

In 2006, after four years of research and more than 165,000 of investment, Fanxing Science and Technology, a company in Shenzhen, China, unveiled the world's first cooking robot, the AIC-AI Cooking Robot, which is able, at the touch of a button, to fry, bake, boil and steam its way through thousands of Chinese delicacies from at least three culinary regions. AIC-AI needs a special stove for cooking, but many of the mechanised culinary wizards developed since then can work on almost any kind of stove, as long as the robot is either shown ahead of time how a particular stove works or the stove's characteristics are programmed into the robot's software.

In 2008, scientists at the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland, produced one such teachable chef, the Chief Cook Robot, which can make omelettes. That same year, at the Osaka Museum of Creative Industries, in Japan, a programmable robot began preparing takoyaki (octopus balls) from scratch, a chef's bandana wrapped jauntily around its upper module.

Last June, at the International Food Machinery and Technology Expo, in Tokyo, a broad-shouldered Motoman SDA-10 robot with spatulas for arms made okonomiyaki (savoury pancakes); another robot grabbed sushi with an eerily realistic hand; and still another, the Dynamiser, sliced cucumbers at inhumanly fast speeds and occasionally complained about being tired and wanting to go home.

Then, a month later in Nagoya, Japan, the Famen restaurant opened, with two giant yellow robot arms preparing up to 800 bowls of ramen a day. When business is slow, the robots act out a scripted comedy routine and spar with knives. "The concept of this restaurant is that Robot number one is the manager, and boils the noodles, and Robot number two is the deputy manager, and prepares the soup and puts on toppings," says Famen's owner, Kenji Nagaya. "Human staff are working for the two robots."

In the throes of an economic downturn, with unemployment rates mounting, the very idea of a robot chef might seem indulgent at best – at worst, downright offensive. But these robots aren't likely to be acting as sous chefs or bringing you the pepper any time soon, and the bad economy might be part of the reason. At 67,000 a pair, Nagaya says the cost of his robots is "too high to make bowls of ramen".

But they may be worth the cost at Nagaya's other workplace, the robotics company Aisei, in Nagoya, where he is the president. "I have made and programmed industrial robots at our company for so long, and I was thinking to set up a place to promote our business," he says. "I love ramen a lot, and ramen restaurants are always featured in magazines and on television in Japan, so I thought opening a ramen shop with robots would have a huge impact on promoting our business."

Meanwhile, Mikio Shimizu, the president of Squse, the company in Kyoto, Japan, that is responsible for the sushi-grabbing hand, says his ultimate goal is to become the world's largest maker of functional prosthetic hands.

Narito Hosomi, the president of Toyo Riki, a company in Osaka that programs the robots responsible for the octopus balls and savoury pancakes, says the final destination for the robots, which cost 133,000 each, was more likely a factory than a kitchen.

But it's not interesting to watch robots welding, Dr Hosomi says. "If you see robots do the same work as you do in everyday life with the tools you use, it would be easier to understand the functional capability of robots. The okonomiyaki robot is a medium for that purpose. We say a robot can make okonomiyaki, takoyaki – well, what would you like a robot to do for you?"

While cooking is certainly a more universal way to showcase a robot's abilities than, say, laser-welding, it is also unique in its ability to tackle something deeper: namely, the public's collective Terminator-fueled angst over a future populated by vengeful hominoid machines.

Dr Heather Knight, a roboticist at the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says the industry is trying to change the image 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 says.

"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."

• Step 2...

In fact, Dr Aude Billard, whose team designed the egg-handling Chief Cook Robot, said that she decided on omelettes because it was the first dish her partner cooked for her. The omelette-making was meant to show how a robot could be taught to accomplish complex tasks. It was also "something that all the guys in the lab knew sufficiently well to be able to train the robot", she says.

But perhaps the biggest accomplishment of this new wave of sustenance-bearing machines is their departure from what defined their predecessors. The Fritz Lang level of efficiency normally associated with robots is notably absent — and that's no accident. "A simple rule of robotic personality seems to be: don't make things the most efficient way," says Magnus Wurzer, who has been running the Vienna-based Roboexotica, a festival where scientists have gone to build, showcase and discuss cocktail robots since 1999.

One entry, Beerbot, detects approaching people and asks for beer money. When it acquires enough, it buys itself a beer. Bystanders can watch the liquid flow into a transparent bladder. As for other humanising behaviours, "like a robot that doesn't stop short at lighting a cigarette but actually goes ahead and smokes it", Wurzer says. "We had that."

Roboexotica has inspired a United States version as well, which just had its third annual celebration in San Francisco. And in at least one case in the UK, a robot actually got behind a bar. From 1999 to 2002, a scarlet-eyed metal robot named Cynthia poured drinks at Cynthia's Bridge Bar and Lounge, in London. But according to Wurzer, "She was too costly to maintain once the bar was sold by the robot's maker."

But a reviewer at travel information website www.virtual-london.com suggests that Cynthia's problems went deeper than that. "She whirls into action, pouring drinks to perfection, mixing them, recounting awful jokes and chuckling to herself while frightened customers feel grateful she's not allowed out from behind the bar."

It seems that truly humanising behaviour is a very difficult thing to master, though that's what Snackbot's creator aims for. "How do you get a service robot to interact with humans?" Dr Rybski asks. "That's a problem. It's different when you're working with a human versus a pipe on an assembly line."

To prepare, one of Dr Rybski's students, Korean Min Kyung Lee, spent two days staked out behind a campus hot dog vendor, taking notes on how he interacted with his customers. She used what she learned to programme the robot's dialogue.

Apart from the obvious challenges of instilling a machine with personality, there's the other, long-held axiom in the world of robotics: what might seem second-nature to humans can be all but impossible to teach a machine. Wurzer says that one scientist at Roboexotica built a robot solely dedicated to the preparation of mojitos – "with the grinding and stomping and all". And yet the most challenging task for all the robots, he said, was probably the one thing that no human bartender ever botches: handling the ice.

The Chief Cook Robot still relies on human beings to crack eggs – the shells are far too delicate for its metal hands. The okonomiyaki-making robot needs its vegetables prepared, a task arguably better suited to a robot. And while robots could certainly be developed and trained for these tasks, some culinary arts are so delicate and ancient, so venerated and sanctified, that even these machines' creators wouldn't trust them to inhuman hands. "Would you like to have a robot hand that makes sushi?" says Shimizu, whose firm created the sushi-grabbing hand. "Do you really want it? For making good sushi, a robot never can beat a human professional sushi chef. A robot never can go beyond a human's skill or human intelligence."

But the biggest obstacle to a world full of mechanised sous-chefs and simulated, rage-filled robotic Gordon Ramsays may be something much harder to fake: none of these robots can taste.

Keizo Shimamoto, who writes a blog on ramen noodles and has eaten at the Japanese restaurant Famen, with its two robots, says that the establishment was "kind of dead" when he ate there last year. Though the owner insists that real people do taste the food, according to Shimamoto it was "a little disappointing".

It's one thing to get people to stop by to see the robots in action. "But to keep the customers coming back," he says, "you need better soup."

New York Times 2010

Our favourite automatons

T-800 from The Terminator He may be governor of California now but Arnie's leather-clad, monosyllabic role as the heroic cyborg is the stuff of movie legend.

R2-D2 and C3-PO from Star Wars An audacious robot whose beeps conveyed more feeling than Ewan McGregor managed as Obi Wan Kenobi, R2-D2 was the perfect foil to the fey C3-PO.

Marvin the Paranoid Android, from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Who says robots don't have feelings? A depressed Marvin stole the show in 2005 film.

Optimus Prime, from Transformers Originally a civilian, Prime has been referred to as an autobot version of Barack Obama for his awe-inspiring leadership qualities.

K9, from Doctor Who Loyal companion to the time lord and his lovely ladies, this robotic dog was equipped with offensive and defensive weapons and a highly intelligent cyber-brain.

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, March 7, 2010