Comments on: Knife-Wielding Robot Slices Cucumber

Knife-Wielding Robot Slices Cucumber

wanderingmind — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 09:34:15 -0800

Korean robot prepares salad ... very slowly. It also is (apparently) capable of loading a dishwasher, although there's no video of that.

By: ian1977

ian1977 — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 09:38:42 -0800

Lorena Robbot

By: chambers

chambers — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 09:49:16 -0800

I'm curious is the speed limitation is inherent to the object/spacial recognition and control systems, or it is slowed down for debugging purposes. I really want to see how fast it can go.

By: Foci for Analysis

Foci for Analysis — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 09:51:44 -0800

Salad-kun looks more scripted than a first-person shooter by EA (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 09:52:21 -0800

It also is (apparently) capable of loading a dishwasher, although there's no video of that Husbandbot 2.0

By: RobotHero

RobotHero — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 10:20:25 -0800

Stand back, I got to practice my stabbin' I've grown used to the slow speed for the multi-purpose machines, but I am still disappointed how uneven the thickness of those cucumber slices were. And it was drowning that salad, not dressing it. I think I'll just have mine load the washing machine. ( Though could you get a robot to wash them by hand? It would save some space in the kitchen if you didn't have a single-purpose washing machine. )

By: caaaaaam

caaaaaam — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 10:41:39 -0800

Wait— how did those slices get on the plate?? I'm curious is the speed limitation is inherent to the object/spacial recognition and control systems, or it is slowed down for debugging purposes. I'm pretty sure the bottleneck is indeed in the perception and planning, unfortunately. I want to see the robot autonomously get frustrated when a slice of cucumber gets stuck to the side of the knife.

By: howfar

howfar — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:03:18 -0800

Doo dee doo dee doodly doo dee I'm gonna have that in my head all night.

By: bonobothegreat

bonobothegreat — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:39:34 -0800

..and I'll have the same but without the pink plastic scrapings, please.

By: Mister_A

Mister_A — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:40:39 -0800

This robot is going to take jobs that American robots don't want to do anyway! Booo!

By: Kronos_to_Earth

Kronos_to_Earth — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:43:30 -0800

Even as a marketable product, I guess it'll need some adjusting: the bartender in 'The Fifth Element'.

By: Sys Rq

Sys Rq — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:44:47 -0800

Oh, good, he put the dirty knife back where he got it without cleaning it. Somebody get that robot a salad shooter.

By: Dojie

Dojie — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:45:58 -0800

My kids are also (apparently) capable of loading a dishwasher, but there's no evidence of that either. I'm not going to trade them in for a robot until I see some proof.

By: Kronos_to_Earth

Kronos_to_Earth — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:49:49 -0800

Well, the robot is the salad shooter.

By: maryr

maryr — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 12:02:01 -0800

Infinitely small cucumber slices...

By: Kabanos

Kabanos — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 12:13:45 -0800

I would not want this robot tossing my salad.

By: slogger

slogger — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 12:31:26 -0800

Am I the only one who gets nervous seeing a semiautonomous robot wielding a knife?

By: Mister_A

Mister_A — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 12:39:36 -0800

Yes, you would have to slowly amble away from that robot if it came at you with the knife!

By: Kronos_to_Earth

Kronos_to_Earth — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 12:44:29 -0800

eeesh. Sorry Sys Rq. Didn't read your comment at all carefully; I only saw the line with the link.

By: PhoBWanKenobi

PhoBWanKenobi — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 12:44:47 -0800

Like I need another single-use appliance!

By: mr_crash_davis

mr_crash_davis — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 12:55:03 -0800

Dammit. Got here too late to make the salad shooter joke.

By: Segundus

Segundus — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 13:44:54 -0800

The latest in Korean robotics technology suggests we are getting there - but slowly. Well, no, alas. We're not getting there at all. There is such a contrast between the geometric growth in computer processing power (many orders of magnitude) and the hardly-at-all growth in the capacity of domestic robots. They still perform tasks very poorly and yet always turn out to be heavily scripted or outright puppeteered. We're just missing something fundamental, and whatever it is, it isn't computational power.

By: dr_dank

dr_dank — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 13:45:55 -0800

You can have one of mine mr_crash_davis. The Great Carnak: A salad shooter. rips open envelope What you'd call a vegetarian with diarrhea. Hey-o!

By: deo rei

deo rei — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 14:38:27 -0800

Rodney Brooks had an interesting idea in the 90s with his subsumption architecture, which I understand as a reaction to the ponderous knowledge representation systems championed by people like Minsky - systems that could maybe tell you where the Wumpus was but failed miserably at even the simplest real-world interaction problems. I attended one of Brooks's lectures in the late 90s when expectations for Cog and Kismet were still high (at least among a certain 'I want to believe' type audience). He was supremely confident, to the point of being off-putting. I remember him saying "I'm going to create intelligence not from the top down, but from the bottom up - I'll start with cockroaches, then move to cats and dogs, and end up at humans". A couple of years later he followed through on that, started iRobot and created the Roomba. But it seems he never got much beyond cockroaches, except he styled them to look like humans a bit (and the idea of a full subsumption architecture was, well, further and further subsumed). I guess the Boston Dynamics folks (also MIT) with Big Dog and their other projects are his most immediate heirs, machines like creatures that exhibit a truly embodied or situated intelligence. But they exude DANGER as well. On the other end of the spectrum there's still the symbolic reasoning / Three Laws conception of intelligence, the kind where you can blow a robot's brain to bits by posing it a logical paradox. This sad salad slave seems like a great example of that. Even though Brooks didn't deliver anywhere near what he promised I think he really had/has a point when it comes to the development of intelligent systems. When I'm feeling fanciful I like to muse that perhaps creating something that strikes us as fiercely intelligent, it's impossible to fully predict what the system will do - it's chaotic, the behavior a result of a myriad loosely coupled feedback loops running in parallel, constantly inhibiting and activating each other. A machine like that would slice your salad like a ninja. Problem: it would actually be a ninja.

By: stet

stet — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 17:42:43 -0800

RobotHero: "And it was drowning that salad, not dressing it." Salad dressings in Asian cuisines generally do not have as much fat as Western dressing. This fat is what makes the dressing adhere to the lettuce. Lack that adhesion, a typical Asian approach is to apply dressing in quantities that would drown the salad but, in this case, merely account for the amount of dressing that's going to fall of the salad and back into the bowl. And there is an expectation that the bowl will be full of leftover dressing when you're done. Or so a food podcast I listen to tells me.