Snacks Are Tastier When Served By A Robot
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 12 of October , 2009 at 12:01 am
If you’re going to have a testbed robot wandering around investigating autonomous operations in office environments, you might as well have it do something useful. Like passing out snacks. Seriously… Greatest. Use. For a robot. Ever. SnackBot works at Carnegie Mellon University, which is way way too far away from me right now, ’cause I’m hungry.
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.
Oh, and of course, SnackBot will support “research on snack services drawn from behavioral economics.” I can solve that for you right now: snacks are tasty, people like snacks, and a robot that brings tasty snacks to people will be well liked by all.
[ SnackBot.org ]
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Comment by Travis
Made Sunday, 18 of October , 2009 at 2:37 pm
Very cool find.
If you haven’t seen some of the old build-log photos (robot guts), you might enjoy checking them out over on Hizook.com