This is PR2. PR2 plays pool. PR2 brings you beer. And now, or very soon anyway, PR2 will bake you cookies. Warm, gooey, chocolate chip cookies. Seriously, is this not the greatest robot in the world or what?
This video comes from graduate student Mario Bollini, who's a member of Daniela Rus' Distributed Robotics Lab at MIT CSAIL. It's not in the video, but as you can see from the picture, PR2 (or "bakebot" for the purposes of this demo) is also able to cream butter and sugar, and we already know that it can break (or not break) eggs. It does make a bit of a mess, which is the reason for the surgical smock, but a separate group is programming the robot to wipe down the table afterwards. Incidentally, I love how when PR2 finishes adding an ingredient to its mixing bowl, it just drops the container on the floor. Now that's my kind of clean-up.
Bollini hopes to have PR2 making cookies from start to finish within the shockingly short time of a month. Or actually, it'll be just making one single giant cookie at a time, but you know what, I'm totally okay with that.
[ MIT ]
Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.