can’t be a memo Become the world’s fastest barista, but that’s impressive for a robot.
I recently watched Memo, a new home robot from a company called Sunday Robotics, make coffee in an open-plan kitchen in Mountain View, California.
With a bright white body, two arms, a friendly cartoon-like face and a red baseball cap, Memo resembles Wall-E. Instead of using legs like a fully humanoid robot, Memo moves around using a wheeled platform and changes its height by sliding up and down a central column above that platform.
The robot responded to the request for espresso by rolling it onto the countertop, and then used two pincer-like hands to slowly complete each step required to operate the espresso machine. It took filling the porta filters with coffee grounds, pressing them down, slotting the porta filters in place and placing a coffee cup in the bottom, pressing the necessary buttons to start the machine, and finally getting the hot beverage.
“We want to create robots that free people from doing laundry, from washing dishes, from all that work,” Tony Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Sunday Robotics, told me as the robot brought coffee to the person who requested it.
Making a cup of espresso may not sound spectacular, but it’s ridiculously hard for a robot to do this job in a real, messy kitchen. It requires the ability to identify different objects, know how to hold them reliably, and use those objects correctly. Sunday is not only building its own hardware but also training the models that allow its system to learn. “We think the way to build home robots is to be full-stack and vertically integrated,” says Zhao. “And it’s a very ambitious thing to do.”
Courtesy of Sunday Robotics
