Robot Servant Anticipates When You Want Another Beer and Pours One (Video)

Cornell University researchers have officially designed the perfect robot. They've created a machine that can actually anticipate when you want another beer--and then pour it for you. The bartending robot doesn't event expect a tip.

The robot itself is a PR2 robot from Willow Garage. Known as both adaptable and domestic, Cornell researchers thought that the machine would be perfect for what they had in mind. Equipped with a Kinect 3D camera and a database of 3D videos, the robot can analyze what it sees by breaking down activities into several steps. It then anticipates what might happen next with objects that it picks out of the scene; it figures out what the most likely step would be for activities like eating, drinking, cleaning and putting things away.

"Looking a bit into the future helps a lot," said Ashutosh Saxena, one of the computer scientists who programmed the robot, in an interview with Wired. In fact, the code that powers this robot and its predicting abilities is available under an open source license. Already, people have downloaded the code and asked how they can take it further.

The real powerhouse behind the robot is the new algorithm that the researchers designed. The code is what has taught the robot to guess what action happens next--something that humans do all the time. It allows the robot to serve people better, and may pave the way for a real Rosie the Robot.

"Even though humans are predictable, they are only predictable part of the time," said Saxena in a news release. "The future would be to figure out how the robot plans its actions. Right now, we are almost hard-coding the responses, but there should be a way for the robot to learn how to respond."

The research doesn't only have implications for your very own robot maid, though. The new code and study could potentially eventually encourage the creation of robots that can better work alongside humans in factories, offices or hospitals.

Want to see how the robot acts for yourself? You can check it out below in the YouTube video, courtesy of Cornell University.