Here is a robot for the junk food junkies everywhere. If you need a snack, then this is the machine for you. Carnegie Mellon University has developed this robot to serve snacks to students, faculty, and office personnel that work on the campus. Of course, it also has a more serious purpose: To serve (pun intended) as a research platform for autonomous operations in a business office environment.
As the researchers explain, "The research will allow the robot to navigate through congested areas in a socially acceptable fashion, detect individual people moving near the robot, recognize when someone that the robot knows approaches it, and autonomously learn to recognize new objects."
If you look at the original source for this article at Carnegie Mellon’s website, then you will find video links and a pdf of the research paper on the Snackbot.
Credit: Carnegie Mellon University via Live Science
Snackbot is an autonomous mobile robot whose mission is to bring tasty treats.
New Robot Delivers Snacks by Bill Christensen
Sat, 17 Oct 2009 13:10:03 GMT
Snackbot is a mobile autonomous robot, intended for both fully autonomous and semi-autonomous operation, built by an interdisciplinary team at Carnegie Mellon University. Snackbot has two jobs. One job is to serve as a research platform for projects in robotics, design, and behavioral science. We welcome new partners or sponsors for this work. Snackbot’s other job is to serve snacks.
Original Source:
Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.snackbot.org/about-public.htmlLee, M.K., Forlizzi, J., Rybski, P.E., Crabbe, F., Chung, W., Finkle, J., Glaser, E., and Kiesler, S. (2009) The Snackbot: Documenting the design of a robot for long-term human-robot interaction. In
Proceedings of HRI2009, 7-14. [pdf]