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One Per Cent: A New Scientist Blog

BakeBot robot cooks a cookie from scratch

Melissae Fellet, reporter

It won't win many marks for tidiness in the kitchen. And it's certainly no Martha Stewart. But this robot knows how to bake a cookie from start to finish - albeit rather messily.

Mario Bollini, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, programmed a PR2 robot from Willow Garage to mix cookie dough, scrape it into a pan, and put the pan in the oven. The robot, dubbed "BakeBot," even looks the part, wearing a jaunty chef's hat and a paper surgical smock as an improvised apron. It also has a special modification for cooking - a rubber scraper taped to its right hand.

Baking cookies may seem like a simple task for us, but it's challenging to break down the entire project into individual steps for a robot. The robot must follow a lengthy recipe that requires delicate hand-eye coordination to pick up bowls and stop stirring when the dough is evenly mixed.

The robot uses a camera and a laser scanner to generate a 3D map of the objects on the table. It identifies bowls by colour and sequentially adds the pre-measured ingredients to the main mixing bowl. BakeBot's movements, although carefully controlled, lack human finesse. It plunges the spoon into the bowl, pauses briefly and then violently creams the butter and sugar together, mashing the mixture against the sides of the bowl.

Then it pours flour, cocoa powder and puffed rice cereal into the mixing bowl. It stirs the dough with the gusto of a 5-year old, flinging some flour onto the counter, and plops it in a pan with a shake of the bowl.

The final mound of cookie isn't pretty. But it tastes fabulous, says Daniela Rus, Bollini's advisor and leader of the Distributed Robotics Lab at MIT. Willow Garage robots have already been taught how to bake pancakes.

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1 Comment

Um, Im someone puzzled, and saddened, by the use of terms such as, plunge, violently, and such when it comes to robotic movements.

Nobody knows about basic industrial proportional, integral, differential code blocks that have been around for.. well, depends what architecture you prefer. If you want mechanical analog, well over 100 years?

The trick for programming robot motion to be like humans is first to use a simple PID code block, then, and this is important, realise that the command you give for where the target is, is wrong at the moment you set it, and will always be wrong.

Accept the fact that you can only aim for within a certain error range and stop trying to claim absolute control. Even 8 bit resolution in sensors and actuators is often out of error bounds as materials flex in percentages under stress.

Try implementing an 8 bit resolution per joint (scaling) control at a thousand times a second updaet, and see if you can make motion as smoothly, apparently as a human. Then, look carefully at a human, and watch them tremble due to the random pulse sequences used for encoding neural signals.

Apart from that, not bad at all, still sticking with the fallacies from the 1950s, but apart from that, a good try.

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