9 ms·

'sudo make me a sandwich' has become a reality

127 points by bfrs 15y ago

Ideka 15y ago
To think that xkcd can make stuff like this happen...
- atallcostsky 15y ago
  More xkcd real life fun: http://xkcd.com/chesscoaster/ http://xkcd.com/chesscoaster/
jiggy2011 15y ago
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?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- ghshephard 15y ago
  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. :-) ]
  - jeffool 15y ago
    I think you're overestimating how long it'll take until we have automated restaurants. I think we'll have deployment of several fast food places with automated drive thrus within ten years. Though I expect it to be a touch screen coated with thick plastic that horribly obscures the actual menu. Like a shoddy ATM at a corner store. Then again, I'm perpetually disappointed with the slow pace of advancement. I often expect too much.
    - ghshephard 15y ago
      I guarantee you that there will not be a fully automated fast food restaurant in 10 years, possible exception being a massively inefficient MIT Science project. There is just no way to make it economical versus hiring humans for $10/hour in that time frame.
  - delinka 15y ago
    "It's going to take about 40-50 years to reproduce what humans can do in a restaurant today with robots." I'm not so sure. Take a look at the machinery that produces packaged food now-- it's fairly impressive that every step is automated and human intervention is seldom involved. I don't see a technical reason an entire McDonald's couldn't be completely automated now. If you can analyze and quantify each step in the process, you can build a machine to perform each step. Customers expect to give special orders (hold the pickles, hold the lettuce), but you can provide those options in a software interface. Customers expect handling of exceptional circumstances (the pie is too dry, please replace it), but McDonald's-style preparatory science can help prevent such things (e.g. instead of cooking 12 pies at once, the equipment could cook a pie every few minutes.) I think the biggest problem is customers expecting to give orders in spoken language, but we're having trouble cracking that nut with software (noise, dialects, etc.) Also, there's political backlash for having few (if any) employees.
    - jiggy2011 15y ago
      Why would the robots need to recognize voice at all? Simply have a text menu which could be translated into all major languages and let people pick from that using either their smartphones or wall mounted touch screens.
- Natsu 15y ago
  I visit those Pizza Hut express stores and watch them make my pizza all the time. I don't see anything they do that couldn't be done by a fairly complex vending machine....
  - pstuart 15y ago
    It's been done: http://wonderpizzausa.com/ http://wonderpizzausa.com/ Oops. Bad example, appears to vend only pre-made pizzas. This one actually makes it from scratch: http://www.letspizza.co.uk/gallery.html http://www.letspizza.co.uk/gallery.html
    - Natsu 15y ago
      Actually, the original wasn't a bad example, because the Pizza Hut Express stores already cook pre-made pizzas by putting them on a slow conveyor that goes through a small oven. Okay, so they turn the cheese pizzas into pepperoni by putting peperoni slices on top, but I'm sure a vending machine could be made that does that much.
- pwim 15y ago
  The future is already here: http://www.onlyinjapan.org/2010/10/20/fuamen-the-new-japanese-restaurant-with-robot-chefs/ http://www.onlyinjapan.org/2010/10/20/fuamen-the-new-japanes...
- celias 15y ago
  Sheldon: You realize, Penny, that the technology that went into this arm will one day make unskilled food servers such as yourself obsolete. Penny: Really? They’re going to make a robot that spits on your hamburger?
kellysutton 15y ago
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-sandwich-robot/ http://www.nycresistor.com/2009/02/27/sudo-make-me-a-sandwic...
hristov 15y ago
Why would you need administrative privileges for that?
- noonespecial 15y ago
  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/ http://xkcd.com/149/
  - Zaak 15y ago
    Remember, before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey. http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/scratch-monkey.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/scratch-monkey.html
  - treetrouble 15y ago
    xkcd reference aside, hristov's question is totally legitimate. sudo is intended to run administrative commands. normally you would use a "physical" group to grant access like you're describing
  - einhverfr 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      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.
stretchwithme 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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 ;)
    - stretchwithme 15y ago
      How far food has to travel to get to where its assembled into meals has nothing to do with the human labor that goes into producing a meal.
sown 15y ago
I resent being too stupid to work there. :(
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  Me too. Every time I make popcorn, I burn it. Damn you, robots! They're taking our jobs, I tells you.
jrockway 15y ago
No rule to make target `me'. Stop.
beilabs 15y ago
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.
trb 15y ago
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 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.html http://www.pointclouds.org/news/kinectfusion-open-source.htm... 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/ http://hobonaut.com/
moocow01 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
nickpp 15y ago
It's actually 'Siri, make me a sandwich' now.
antihero 15y ago
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.

127 points by bfrs 15y ago

Ideka 15y ago

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

atallcostsky 15y ago
More xkcd real life fun: http://xkcd.com/chesscoaster/ http://xkcd.com/chesscoaster/

jiggy2011 15y ago

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?

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ghshephard 15y ago
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. :-) ]
- jeffool 15y ago
  I think you're overestimating how long it'll take until we have automated restaurants. I think we'll have deployment of several fast food places with automated drive thrus within ten years. Though I expect it to be a touch screen coated with thick plastic that horribly obscures the actual menu. Like a shoddy ATM at a corner store. Then again, I'm perpetually disappointed with the slow pace of advancement. I often expect too much.
  - ghshephard 15y ago
    I guarantee you that there will not be a fully automated fast food restaurant in 10 years, possible exception being a massively inefficient MIT Science project. There is just no way to make it economical versus hiring humans for $10/hour in that time frame.
- delinka 15y ago
  "It's going to take about 40-50 years to reproduce what humans can do in a restaurant today with robots." I'm not so sure. Take a look at the machinery that produces packaged food now-- it's fairly impressive that every step is automated and human intervention is seldom involved. I don't see a technical reason an entire McDonald's couldn't be completely automated now. If you can analyze and quantify each step in the process, you can build a machine to perform each step. Customers expect to give special orders (hold the pickles, hold the lettuce), but you can provide those options in a software interface. Customers expect handling of exceptional circumstances (the pie is too dry, please replace it), but McDonald's-style preparatory science can help prevent such things (e.g. instead of cooking 12 pies at once, the equipment could cook a pie every few minutes.) I think the biggest problem is customers expecting to give orders in spoken language, but we're having trouble cracking that nut with software (noise, dialects, etc.) Also, there's political backlash for having few (if any) employees.
  - jiggy2011 15y ago
    Why would the robots need to recognize voice at all? Simply have a text menu which could be translated into all major languages and let people pick from that using either their smartphones or wall mounted touch screens.
Natsu 15y ago
I visit those Pizza Hut express stores and watch them make my pizza all the time. I don't see anything they do that couldn't be done by a fairly complex vending machine....
- pstuart 15y ago
  It's been done: http://wonderpizzausa.com/ http://wonderpizzausa.com/ Oops. Bad example, appears to vend only pre-made pizzas. This one actually makes it from scratch: http://www.letspizza.co.uk/gallery.html http://www.letspizza.co.uk/gallery.html
  - Natsu 15y ago
    Actually, the original wasn't a bad example, because the Pizza Hut Express stores already cook pre-made pizzas by putting them on a slow conveyor that goes through a small oven. Okay, so they turn the cheese pizzas into pepperoni by putting peperoni slices on top, but I'm sure a vending machine could be made that does that much.
pwim 15y ago
The future is already here: http://www.onlyinjapan.org/2010/10/20/fuamen-the-new-japanese-restaurant-with-robot-chefs/ http://www.onlyinjapan.org/2010/10/20/fuamen-the-new-japanes...
celias 15y ago
Sheldon: You realize, Penny, that the technology that went into this arm will one day make unskilled food servers such as yourself obsolete. Penny: Really? They’re going to make a robot that spits on your hamburger?

kellysutton 15y ago

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-sandwich-robot/ http://www.nycresistor.com/2009/02/27/sudo-make-me-a-sandwic...

hristov 15y ago

Why would you need administrative privileges for that?

noonespecial 15y ago
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/ http://xkcd.com/149/
- Zaak 15y ago
  Remember, before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey. http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/scratch-monkey.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/scratch-monkey.html
- treetrouble 15y ago
  xkcd reference aside, hristov's question is totally legitimate. sudo is intended to run administrative commands. normally you would use a "physical" group to grant access like you're describing
- einhverfr 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.

stretchwithme 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 ;)
  - stretchwithme 15y ago
    How far food has to travel to get to where its assembled into meals has nothing to do with the human labor that goes into producing a meal.

sown 15y ago

I resent being too stupid to work there. :(

pavel_lishin 15y ago
Me too. Every time I make popcorn, I burn it. Damn you, robots! They're taking our jobs, I tells you.

jrockway 15y ago

No rule to make target `me'. Stop.

beilabs 15y ago

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.

trb 15y ago

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 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.html http://www.pointclouds.org/news/kinectfusion-open-source.htm... 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/ http://hobonaut.com/

moocow01 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.

nickpp 15y ago

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

antihero 15y ago

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.