The note may not be the fastest barista in the world, but that’s impressive – for a robot.
I recently watched Memo, a modern home robot from Sunday Robotics, make coffee in an open-plan kitchen in Mountain View, California.
Memo looks like something out of Wall-E, with a shiny white body, two arms, a genial cartoon face, and a red baseball cap. Instead of using its legs as a fully humanoid robot would, Memo moves using a wheeled platform and changes its height by sliding up and down on a central column on top of the platform.
The robot responded to the request for an espresso by rolling onto the counter and then using two tong-like hands to slowly complete each step required to operate the espresso machine. He filled the porta filter with coffee grounds, tamped them down, put the porta filter in place and placed a cup of coffee under it, pressed the buttons to start the machine, and finally pulled out the sizzling drink.
“We want to build robots that will free people from doing laundry, doing dishes and all the household chores,” Tony Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Sunday Robotics, told me as the robot brought coffee to someone who asked for it.
Making a cup of espresso may not seem spectacular, but it’s ridiculously challenging for a robot to do so in a real, sullied kitchen. It requires the ability to identify different objects, find a way to grip them reliably and apply them correctly. Sunday not only builds his own hardware, but also trains models that allow his system to learn. “We think the way to create a home robot is to be full stack and vertically integrated,” Zhao says. “And this is a very ambitious job.”
Courtesy of Sunday Robotics