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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 16, 2015

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REAL LIFE IMITATES FED: ROBOT BAR STAFF

by Hazed

Researchers at MIT have come up with a team of three robots that can work together to deliver beer, quite a feat given the complexities and uncertainties of interacting with humans. The robot bartender and two waitdroids sound like the staff you’d find in many bars in Fed DataSpace.

The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT have invented technology which could translate to cooperate robotic systems not just for working in bars and restaurants, but also hospitals and disaster systems.

The researchers had to devise ways to deal with sensors that are not all that accurate in determining the location and status of the droids, and the things around them. They had to ensure the droids could cope with unpredictable outcomes such as dropped items, and that they could cope when they were unable to communicate with each other due to noise or being out of range.

Those uncertainties meant the team had to come up with a new planning approach which would allow the robots to view their tasks more like humans do, by completing basic tasks without having to concentrate on every single step. The team calls these “macro-actions” and the idea is that the robots can be prepared for a general task which has various outcomes without needing step by step instructions or having someone guide them the whole way.

In other words, they are programmed to perform a series of macro-actions that each include multiple steps, which may have different outcomes. For example, when a waitdroid enters the bar, it may be confronted with a variety of situations, such as the bartender being busy serving another waiter robot or not being in sight at all.

The MIT team turned their workplace into a makeshift bar in order to test out their team of barbots. A pair of Turtlebots (open source wheeled robots) acted as the waitdroids. They visited the different offices where thirsty humans were working, to take their orders. The customers would push a button on the robot to request a drink. This would prompt the robot to return to the bar, where a PR2 robot was waiting to fill the order, placing in it a cooler carried by the Turtlebot, which would then deliver it to the human who ordered it.

Sounds ingenious! Things didn’t go smoothly right away, and the MIT researchers had to use all their ingenuity to come up with more complex algorithms to help the robots cope with their tasks.

Click the source link below for details of the problems, and to watch a video of the team of barbots in action.

I would imagine that before these could be deployed in a real bar, they would have to learn to cope with drunken humans that might try to mess them up – something human wait staff have to deal with all the time.

Source: http://www.gizmag.com/beerbots-dcooperative-robotic-bar-wait-staff/38885/

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