

'sudo make me a sandwich' has become a reality - bfrs
http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2011/12/12/tum-rosie-and-pr2-james-add-popcorn-and-sandwiches-their-accomplishments

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stretchwithme
very cool.

Of course, this won't be how food is prepared by robots ultimately. Each step
will more likely be performed by small robots optimized for the task.

Food will also probably be driven from place to place by robotic vehicles. You
might have one company making noodles and sending them to other companies five
minutes away that incorporate them into a dish or other product.

Virtual supply chains will eliminate a lot of capital cost of setting up a
restaurant and reduce the delays that destroy freshness and necessitate
preservatives. Like fabless semiconductor companies, there might be prepless
restaurants.

Another company may just do all the selection and slicing of your vegetables
for you. They may be picked overnight at their peak and delivered to you so
you can throw them in your omelet. The slicing might even happen on the trip
to you.

I can see you selecting a recipe and a web app that prices and source all the
ingredients for you. If you love to cook but don't enjoy finding or prepping
some or all of the ingredients, such arrangements could help you save money
and get better results.

Quite a few people eat the cheapest and most convenient foods they can find.
But in the future, healthy food will be cheaper, fresher and will find you,
hopefully making crap truly uncompetitive.

~~~
onemoreact
Your assuming a vary high density food distribution network. Most restaurants
in the US are in fairly low density areas. So while food is often prepared
offsite, the shipping delays result in preservation issues.

~~~
sliverstorm
He also assumes cheap transportation of goods. Economics & business is poised
to change as we know it when oil production starts flagging, if comparable
alternatives are not found.

"Buying local" may one day no longer be the luxury option at the grocery store
;)

~~~
onemoreact
It often costs more energy to buy local food than to transport it 1/2 way
around the world. Boats are amazingly efficient, trucks are not.

~~~
stretchwithme
Actually, robots growing things on the roof of your house will use even less
fuel.

~~~
onemoreact
This might look like a good idea, but you need to include the energy costs
from building all those tiny robots. Fixing them when they break down.
Building a strong enough roof to hold them, 6 inches of topsoil and your crop.
Irrigation and fertilizer and pesticides for that crop. Storage space for that
crop for the better part of a year including some form of climate control to
minimize spoilage etc etc.

Honestly, sectioning off the mid west and transporting the food to you by
trains is actually a much better idea. You can still use robots but you get to
use really big and cheap ones that do a simple job and get regular maintenance
by people that know what their doing. You can also minimize the contamination
from air pollution etc.

PS: Moving 2 weeks supply of food around the world by boat can easily take
less energy than driving to a 5 miles to the super market to pick it up. If
you want to be as environmentally friendly as possible, move to a big city and
become a vegetarian. Living in the countryside feels more natural but it's
much much worse for the planet.

~~~
stretchwithme
Once robots are growing the food, a lot less of it will be imported. Even with
the cost of maintenance, robots will be cheaper than human labor, eliminating
a major reason for importing.

I guess if you think of robots as they are today, it may seem like they'd
break down a lot. But agricultural robots will eventually be more like insects
and, like many living things, cheaper to replace than repair.

------
jiggy2011
I wonder, how long until we get the first completely automated fast food
restaurant?

You walk in and download the menu over the wifi, pick what you want and pay
with your card. You are then issued with a long unique code.

A machine prepares your meal and your phone prompts you to approach one of the
vending areas. You then enter the code or scan an image and your food appears
through a hole.

How many employees would be needed for serving > 100 per hour?

~~~
ghshephard
It's going to take about 40-50 years to reproduce what humans can do in a
restaurant today with robots. More likely, the food preparation process will
be altered to allow for easier automation. With the exception of a
supervisor/engineer (that position won't be automated for at least another 100
years) - I think we'll see a fully automated fast food restaurant in about
20-25 years - though some elements of the restaurant business (Cleaning,
French Fries, Order taking) - will likely be automated sooner - there will be
demonstration restaurants with 50% automation in about 10 years.

[note: And yes, I do realize that the above predictions will require radical
advancements in automation that are not easy to predict - call me an optimist.
:-) ]

~~~
rmason
I think that you're wrong and I will illustrate why. When I graduated from
college I spent an evening with friends and we mused what we'd buy with our
new paychecks. I wanted a brand new Mustang and indeed I purchased one. But
one friend, the only computer major, said he wanted a computer.

This was pre-pc era and the one he wanted cost as much as a house. We teased
him all night about how speedily he could balance his checkbook or play
checkers. Finally he'd had enough, pounded the table and said with a red face
in ten years you will all have a computer that sits on your desk.

Our only exposure at that time was to the IBM 360 mainframe the school had and
that only made us laugh harder. Truth is he was right, every last one of us
had a pc in ten years.

The computer industry moves faster than you think. A few years later I went to
a local store to see one of the first laser printers for sale. This one was
$10,000 and as a group of us looked at it with the proud sales guy. I said as
soon as I could get one for under $1500 I'll buy it. Everyone looked at me
like I was crazy and the salesmen said maybe in ten years it will happen.
Actually I got an HP Laserjet in around three years for $1499 and still have
it - somewhere.

I'd wager that most of us on HN will have a robot in our house in well under
ten years. I can't wait;<).

~~~
tricolon
Robots are harder than computers or printers.

~~~
dredmorbius
It depends on the robot.

A Roomba can be had for the price of a few weeks' groceries.

Industrial assembly robots run about $60k, though deployment costs are over 3x
that. Curiously, reprogramming a robot is considerably more expensive than the
robot itself, according to one source.

If you have a well-defined, and reasonably attainable task, costs are likely
predictable and possibly finite. If you've got a poorly defined and hard-to-
reach goal, expenses will likely rise to meet resources.

~~~
dlokshin
One thing I'll comment on this is that I have a Roomba, love it, but it does
require quite a bit of human care. About every three clean cycles (I have a
one bedroom apartment) I have to take it apart, clean all the hair that gets
stuck around the brushes + gears) and assemble it back together.

~~~
dredmorbius
FWIW, you'd have to perform similar maintenance on a standard vacuum.

As well as, you know, vacuum with the damned thing.

------
moocow01
I think there is a somewhat unstoppable direction towards automation but it
will probably be shaky and filled with potholes.

For example, its been interesting to see the consumer response to the self
checkout stands in the big chain stores. Those self-checkout stations in their
current form I would say are somewhat of a failure to encourage automation at
least from a consumer's standpoint. I'm a techie and I actively avoid them.
Why? I and the other people I'm waiting in line behind take forever because we
are all slow in finding the bar codes on each product. Not only that, 1 out of
10 times something seemingly goes wrong with checking out a product - the
product needs to be verified by a store manager, the product gets scanned
twice, etc. which all usually end up taking longer than the regular checkout
lines. Interestingly a few of the stores near me just recently removed their
automated systems after having them for many years. (I'm actually hoping one
day they slap RFIDs on everything and you can just push your basket through a
scanner.)

But I think the risk with robots and automated systems is when things go wrong
when interacting with an unpredictable human. Technically when things go wrong
its usually user error but not through the consumer's eyes - to them its a
stupid robot that keeps on throwing their sandwich on the ground and their
response is usually to run back to the old reliable way.

~~~
devicenull
I think that's really an implementation issue, rather then a problem with the
idea. The current batch of self-checkout systems are very very fragile. It
seems that instead of optimizing them for throughput/efficiency, they
optimized them for detecting if you are trying to steal something. For
example, something as simple as brushing the weight sensor will trigger an
alert that takes 15-20s to go away. There's really no reason to do that unless
you are worried about people stealing. In reality, checking the weight is a
very poor way of detecting this (every system I've seen has an "I'm using my
own bag" option that makes the alert go away.

These are actually very unoptimized from the UI point of view too. For
example, most of the people have their own loyalty card they scan at the
beginning. Why not track these, and adjust settings on the machine based on
it? For example, I mute the volume whenever I start, that would be nice to
keep track of. Defaulting to showing me a list food that I've purchased over
my last few trips would make things go quicker instead of me having to dig
through pages of items looking for common things.

------
antihero
I'm rather interested in the amazing amount of abstraction achieved between
"get instructions from internet" and "grab this pot and do shit with it".
Fantastic.

That said, when the bread didn't go in the toaster for a second time I was
half hoping it would start beating it until the toaster was a pile of screwed
up metal.

------
trb
Willowgarage are also the guys behind the Point Cloud Library, an awesome
computer vision library for processing point clouds (e.g. what the Kinect
produces):

<http://www.pointclouds.org/about.html>

The Kinect Fusion implementation by Anatoly Baksheev in their trunk is very
impressive:

[http://www.pointclouds.org/news/kinectfusion-open-
source.htm...](http://www.pointclouds.org/news/kinectfusion-open-source.html)

If anyone has a Kinect and Ubuntu and wants to try it, I've compiled an
unpolished tutorial on how to do that:

<http://hobonaut.com/>

------
beilabs
It's been a reality for a long time in my household. My girlfriend says it to
me a lot ever since I introduced her to Linux.

------
kellysutton
Not to take away from the accomplishment, but NYC Resistor did this 2 years
ago: [http://www.nycresistor.com/2009/02/27/sudo-make-me-a-
sandwic...](http://www.nycresistor.com/2009/02/27/sudo-make-me-a-sandwich-
robot/)

------
hristov
Why would you need administrative privileges for that?

~~~
noonespecial
I'd say that any command that can make something physical happen in the real
world has a whole different set of security concerns than we've faced before.
So its a serious concern.

But on the off chance that anyone missed the inside joke:
<http://xkcd.com/149/>

~~~
einhverfr
But it's not like it's a new problem. I mean printers make something physical
happen in the real world and they aren't exactly new, and last time I checked
I didn't have to use sudo to print a document on Linux.

I am not sure one should need root privileges to burn a CD either.

~~~
wtallis
It is, however, smart to put resource limits on a shared printer so that no
one user can cause it to burn through reams at a time. And even as expensive
as ink is, the ingredients of a sandwich are more expensive than the ink and
paper needed to print a typical document.

Additionally, we've been seeing more and more viruses attacking SCADA systems
(most notably Stuxnet), which show that people have not been taking the
security issues of robotics seriously enough.

~~~
einhverfr
There have been fun pieces of malware for printers too. People who do not
learn from history....

In fact there was an old virus that infected C64 disk drives..... These are
still not new problems.

------
Ideka
To think that xkcd can make stuff like this happen...

~~~
atallcostsky
More xkcd real life fun: <http://xkcd.com/chesscoaster/>

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nickpp
It's actually 'Siri, make me a sandwich' now.

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sown
I resent being too stupid to work there. :(

~~~
pavel_lishin
Me too. Every time I make popcorn, I burn it. Damn you, robots! They're taking
our jobs, I tells you.

------
jrockway
No rule to make target `me'. Stop.

