Fast food robot is a near hoax!
Jim Stone
Fast food robot is a near hoax!
My opinion is that it is overpriced and should not cost so much per year to operate. Someone is raking it in. This thing is worth at most $2000 and costs $60,000+!
At any rate, a new robot has been put to use to flip hamburgers. That's a really basic job, and Burger King has had an automatic hamburger cooker in use for the last 30 years. But the "hamburger flipping robot" looks like an arm that moves, so it is news I guess. See this video that shows how stupid this thing is. https://youtu.be/KJVOfqunm5E
Why is this thing news everywhere? FACT: Burger king's flame broiler is far more capable than this silly robot. Watch the video. A human has to be with the machine to:
1. Lay the burgers down
2. Salt the burgers.
3. Put the cheese on the burgers.
4. put the burgers on the buns, and the punch line:
If the tray the robot puts the hamburgers on is the least bit out of place, it will simply drop the burgers on the table top, rather than have any idea about what it is actually doing.
The robot:
5. Flips the burgers.
6. Cleans the cooking surface.
My conclusion: This thing is beyond rock stupid, for the price there are robots orders of magnitude more capable, that could do ALL SIX STEPS, and if a human needs to do 4 out of six steps to accomodate for the inadequacies of the robot, WHAT GOOD IS IT?
This robot is nothing more than a silly headline. 1980's level tech. Put a cheap pepper robot in charge of that arm with a few software tweaks and it would learn the job in a day, do all steps, and take the burgers to the table!
FINAL ANSWER: The $60,000+ arm is not worth as much as a $2000 Pepper robot, and now, Pepper is android compatible, SOMEONE WILL WRITE A HAMBURGER MAKING APP AND DO THIS RIGHT, and Pepper absolutely would, with the correct app, wait the table too!
Pepper moves with wheels and has no balance circuits, which is a big reason for why it is so cheap. But it has arms and hands that actually work, and can see where it is going and what it is doing. What more would you need for hamburgers?
From: rod@disroot.org