Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Experts are not leaving art of pizza making to robots yet
DO YOU prefer pepperoni? Veggie? One day, you might be ordering your favourite pizza from a robot.
Researchers at a university in Pittsburgh, US, are working on creating a pizza-making robot. Although humans may not find it too difficult to roll out dough, slice toppings and pull it all together, it's not as easy for a robot.
Robots might be great at, say, helping to manufacture cars.
“Robots are preprogrammed to repeat the same actions over and over,” says David Held, a robot expert from Carnegie Mellon University, and a member of a pizza-making team.
Making pizza, though, has challenges. For instance, the dough is squishy, with a shape that can change. It’s easier to programme a robot if the object has one solid shape. Also, pizza-making requires many steps – such as rolling, cutting and gathering – and tools, including a rolling pin and knife. Using a standard robot arm and common tools to handle the functions is trickier.
“If you need to do a cooking task, there are multiple levels that you have to reason,” Held says. But robots can’t “figure out what to do on their own”.
To start, the team used a computer simulation to consider how a robot could lift, flatten, gather, move and cut virtual dough. The method involved two levels of robotic reasoning: one that analysed how it should approach the overall task, and another that analysed how it should move its grippers
to perform each action. The result was considerably better than with the usual programming techniques.
Held and other researchers took what they learnt from the simulation and used it to programme a robot that exists, Sawyer. They then had Sawyer try to roll pizza dough into a little circle, which it didn’t manage to do.
“We got a little bit closer to the right circular shape than the previous methods,” Held says. “But there’s a lot of room for improvement.”
For now, people will continue to make pizza the old-fashioned way. Still, a pizza-making robot is a good goal. In a facility for senior citizens, for example, Held says staff could spend less time in the kitchen and more time interacting with residents. And if a robot could deal with dough, it could also work with other objects that can change shape, such as laundry.
“You can imagine robots assisting in hospitals, or robots that clean up toys in daycares. The general goal is to have robot assistants that can help with whatever the task may be.”