This is it, folks. The epitome of robotics. After some practice runs, PR2 has successfully managed to bake itself a cookie completely from scratch:
Not being a baker, I'm not sure if it's normal for the cookie to look more or less the same coming out of the oven as it does going in. But whatever, it's got chocolate and sugar and butter in it, and we can just act all snooty and say that the cookie has been "deconstructed" by the robot in a spectacular show of culinary skill.
Obviously, there's still a bit of optimizing to be done with BakeBot here, and I'm sure that the students at MIT CSAIL are already putting in lots of overtime running this routine over and over again to try out new algorithms (and recipes). We can all be thankful that they're making this delicious sacrifice in a noble effort to extend the baking capabilities of robots everywhere while keeping their chocolate cravings at bay. Robotics sure is tough, isn't it?
[ MIT CSAIL ]
