'sudo make me a sandwich' has become a reality
willowgarage.com
willowgarage.com
Of course, this won't be how food is prepared by robots ultimately. Each step will more likely be performed by small robots optimized for the task.
Food will also probably be driven from place to place by robotic vehicles. You might have one company making noodles and sending them to other companies five minutes away that incorporate them into a dish or other product.
Virtual supply chains will eliminate a lot of capital cost of setting up a restaurant and reduce the delays that destroy freshness and necessitate preservatives. Like fabless semiconductor companies, there might be prepless restaurants.
Another company may just do all the selection and slicing of your vegetables for you. They may be picked overnight at their peak and delivered to you so you can throw them in your omelet. The slicing might even happen on the trip to you.
I can see you selecting a recipe and a web app that prices and source all the ingredients for you. If you love to cook but don't enjoy finding or prepping some or all of the ingredients, such arrangements could help you save money and get better results.
Quite a few people eat the cheapest and most convenient foods they can find. But in the future, healthy food will be cheaper, fresher and will find you, hopefully making crap truly uncompetitive.
"Buying local" may one day no longer be the luxury option at the grocery store ;)
Honestly, sectioning off the mid west and transporting the food to you by trains is actually a much better idea. You can still use robots but you get to use really big and cheap ones that do a simple job and get regular maintenance by people that know what their doing. You can also minimize the contamination from air pollution etc.
PS: Moving 2 weeks supply of food around the world by boat can easily take less energy than driving to a 5 miles to the super market to pick it up. If you want to be as environmentally friendly as possible, move to a big city and become a vegetarian. Living in the countryside feels more natural but it's much much worse for the planet.
I guess if you think of robots as they are today, it may seem like they'd break down a lot. But agricultural robots will eventually be more like insects and, like many living things, cheaper to replace than repair.
Things cost what they cost because of what's involved in producing them.
A lot of cheap food is cheap because its factory food. It can be grown and processed using machinery, which makes the labor involved per meal very low. Wheat, soy bean oil and corn syrup.
Most vegetables cannot be grown using machinery (yet), but robots that can tend a plant intelligently, that can select and pick vegetables at the right time and assemble them into a meal, will eliminate most of the labor involved.
You walk in and download the menu over the wifi, pick what you want and pay with your card. You are then issued with a long unique code.
A machine prepares your meal and your phone prompts you to approach one of the vending areas. You then enter the code or scan an image and your food appears through a hole.
How many employees would be needed for serving > 100 per hour?
[note: And yes, I do realize that the above predictions will require radical advancements in automation that are not easy to predict - call me an optimist. :-) ]
Though I expect it to be a touch screen coated with thick plastic that horribly obscures the actual menu. Like a shoddy ATM at a corner store.
Then again, I'm perpetually disappointed with the slow pace of advancement. I often expect too much.
There is just no way to make it economical versus hiring humans for $10/hour in that time frame.
I'm not so sure. Take a look at the machinery that produces packaged food now-- it's fairly impressive that every step is automated and human intervention is seldom involved. I don't see a technical reason an entire McDonald's couldn't be completely automated now. If you can analyze and quantify each step in the process, you can build a machine to perform each step.
Customers expect to give special orders (hold the pickles, hold the lettuce), but you can provide those options in a software interface. Customers expect handling of exceptional circumstances (the pie is too dry, please replace it), but McDonald's-style preparatory science can help prevent such things (e.g. instead of cooking 12 pies at once, the equipment could cook a pie every few minutes.) I think the biggest problem is customers expecting to give orders in spoken language, but we're having trouble cracking that nut with software (noise, dialects, etc.) Also, there's political backlash for having few (if any) employees.
I think the next generation will view buying most things via some text or graphics based menu as nothing unusual at all.
Moving this type of sale onto the internet was not a change. Moving the food service industry, where human interaction is expected, into an environment without human interaction goes against people's expectations and habits. Is such a change technically feasible? Yes. Is it practical? Yes. Profitable? Sure, if you can change people's expectations.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I don't even think it'll be a difficult change. I personally would prefer it. But the first chain of restaurants to offer automated food service (and I do believe it'll need to be a chain) has many psychological barriers to overcome, in its investors and its customers.
My understanding is the cash registers at a lot of fast food chains currently use pictures/icons rather than text (and a lot of cashiers can't do simple math for making change if the machine doesn't calculate it for them or there was an error or you would like to change something after the drawer is open). I don't see why this wouldn't work for ordering, and no need to translate into "all major languages".
Also - I would far, far prefer to order my food from a decent touch screen - I suspect the accuracy would greatly increase. (One of the best inventions ever in the takeout was the video screen showing you what the order taker thought you had ordered)
This was pre-pc era and the one he wanted cost as much as a house. We teased him all night about how speedily he could balance his checkbook or play checkers. Finally he'd had enough, pounded the table and said with a red face in ten years you will all have a computer that sits on your desk.
Our only exposure at that time was to the IBM 360 mainframe the school had and that only made us laugh harder. Truth is he was right, every last one of us had a pc in ten years.
The computer industry moves faster than you think. A few years later I went to a local store to see one of the first laser printers for sale. This one was $10,000 and as a group of us looked at it with the proud sales guy. I said as soon as I could get one for under $1500 I'll buy it. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy and the salesmen said maybe in ten years it will happen. Actually I got an HP Laserjet in around three years for $1499 and still have it - somewhere.
I'd wager that most of us on HN will have a robot in our house in well under ten years. I can't wait;<).
A Roomba can be had for the price of a few weeks' groceries.
Industrial assembly robots run about $60k, though deployment costs are over 3x that. Curiously, reprogramming a robot is considerably more expensive than the robot itself, according to one source.
If you have a well-defined, and reasonably attainable task, costs are likely predictable and possibly finite. If you've got a poorly defined and hard-to-reach goal, expenses will likely rise to meet resources.
As well as, you know, vacuum with the damned thing.
If we ignore robotic vacuum cleaners and toys. But there are some incredibly cool robotics applications.
What needs to happen is a "killer application" of a robot in workplace that will be transferable to home. Off the bat I believe that robotic cars (or autopilots as they will be known) will be first major application of robots that can be transplanted from corporate world into home use.
And I can easily see that in 10 years a lot of new cars will be 1. electric and 2. will have an autopilot option.
If they do, I wonder, do most of us already?
Of course I'm not talking about proper restaurants here, I'm talking about somebody who creates a fast food joint based on what can be automated as easily as possible. If something requires a human to make then it doesn't go on the menu.
After all Mcdonalds was basically designed to emulate a factory from the era as much as possible and factory production processes have moved on substantially.
The supervisor role would basically be replaced by a technician, but since humans need allot more supervision than robots, if there was enough reliability and redundancy built in then instead of a full time manager these chains could simply rotate engineers interchangeably between sites (since they are all using the same equipment which does not have human quirks like loyalty).
It would probably be better to replace the single robot with things like a toaster robot and a lifting robot etc.
Oops. Bad example, appears to vend only pre-made pizzas. This one actually makes it from scratch: http://www.letspizza.co.uk/gallery.html
http://www.onlyinjapan.org/2010/10/20/fuamen-the-new-japanes...
Penny: Really? They’re going to make a robot that spits on your hamburger?
For example, its been interesting to see the consumer response to the self checkout stands in the big chain stores. Those self-checkout stations in their current form I would say are somewhat of a failure to encourage automation at least from a consumer's standpoint. I'm a techie and I actively avoid them. Why? I and the other people I'm waiting in line behind take forever because we are all slow in finding the bar codes on each product. Not only that, 1 out of 10 times something seemingly goes wrong with checking out a product - the product needs to be verified by a store manager, the product gets scanned twice, etc. which all usually end up taking longer than the regular checkout lines. Interestingly a few of the stores near me just recently removed their automated systems after having them for many years. (I'm actually hoping one day they slap RFIDs on everything and you can just push your basket through a scanner.)
But I think the risk with robots and automated systems is when things go wrong when interacting with an unpredictable human. Technically when things go wrong its usually user error but not through the consumer's eyes - to them its a stupid robot that keeps on throwing their sandwich on the ground and their response is usually to run back to the old reliable way.
These are actually very unoptimized from the UI point of view too. For example, most of the people have their own loyalty card they scan at the beginning. Why not track these, and adjust settings on the machine based on it? For example, I mute the volume whenever I start, that would be nice to keep track of. Defaulting to showing me a list food that I've purchased over my last few trips would make things go quicker instead of me having to dig through pages of items looking for common things.
That said, when the bread didn't go in the toaster for a second time I was half hoping it would start beating it until the toaster was a pile of screwed up metal.
http://www.pointclouds.org/about.html
The Kinect Fusion implementation by Anatoly Baksheev in their trunk is very impressive:
http://www.pointclouds.org/news/kinectfusion-open-source.htm...
If anyone has a Kinect and Ubuntu and wants to try it, I've compiled an unpolished tutorial on how to do that:
But on the off chance that anyone missed the inside joke: http://xkcd.com/149/
I am not sure one should need root privileges to burn a CD either.
Additionally, we've been seeing more and more viruses attacking SCADA systems (most notably Stuxnet), which show that people have not been taking the security issues of robotics seriously enough.
In fact there was an old virus that infected C64 disk drives..... These are still not new problems.