“What does a guy have to do to get a drink in this place?” could soon be a question associated with yesteryear. A robotics team has developed technology that with further refinement may blaze the trail for the future of in-house beverage service – and perhaps other uses of robots.
The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT has developed a robotic staff of bartenders consisting of those who behave like servers taking orders and a larger bartending bot who remains at the filling station to source the orders brought to it.
Initiated by Chris Amato, now a professor at the University of New Hampshire, BeerBots was presented last month at the annual Robotics Science and Systems conference. The team of researchers detailed the challenges they faced in developing the beer-delivering team. Most notably among these challenges were navigational issues, bot-to-bot communication, managing room noise, and communication obstacles between robots and humans.
Amato’s team reacted to these challenges by developing complex algorithms programmed into the robots to help them plan and reason, according to a Huffington Post report. Said Amato, “Almost all real-world problems have some form of uncertainty baked into them. As a result, there is a huge range of areas where these planning approaches could be of help.” In other words, overcoming all possible challenges is at least as hard as overcoming challenges faced by humans who work in bars.
There is a huge range of areas where these planning approaches could be of help.
A University of Liverpool professor commended the MIT team in a Daily Mail report, stating that they had used robotics to plan at a “high level,” which could allow for the technology to be used in settings involving multiple bots.
These technological developments could also have far-reaching implications for hospitals, disaster situations, and other applications. Coupling these robotic advancements with the advent of robotic self-awareness could bring us to a new age of technology altogether.
