Flipping Pancakes

[Petar and Sylvain] are teaching this robot to flip pancakes. It starts with some kinesthetic learning; a human operator moves the robot arm to flip a pancake while the robot records the motion. Next, motion tracking is used so that the robot can improve during its learning process. It eventually gets the hang of it, as you can see after the break, but we wonder how this will work with real batter. This is a simulated pancake so the weight and amount at of force necessary to unstick it from the pan is always the same. Still, we loved the robotic pizza maker and if they get this to work it’ll earn a special place in our hearts.

[Thanks Ferdinand via Flabber]

26 thoughts on “Flipping Pancakes

  1. @Anon
    Soon…soon. :p But then the pancake/sex bots will make artificial pancake/sex bots to satisfy their desires, and they’ll run off together and leave us all alone. QQ

  2. “amount at of force” typo?

    @Piku
    does mcdonalds even flip burgers any more? I thought they just had some machine with two heated plates that’d sandwich the burger and cook it speedily without the need for flipping

  3. @Piku
    The McDonald’s I was at in the late 90’s (it was a decent High School job) had a robot for making fries. Load the hopper with fries from the bags, it filled the baskets and then dropped ’em and pulled ’em. All you had to do was tell it how many pounds/hour or some such. They eventually got rid of it because of all the maintenance it needed.

  4. That pancake sounds yummy… (CLANG…. CLANG….)

    As for McDonalds, it would be cheaper in the long run, would never need breaks, wouldn’t get sick, wouldn’t take vacation, you only need one of them, if it gets injured it doesn’t sue, etc.

  5. 50 iterations of to learn to flip pancakes might be impressive!

    However, as a surgery robot the 50 kills to learn how to use a scalpel might be a tiny bit to high, or ? Or imagine they use it as an autonmous operator of an atomic power plant, pilot autonomous robot, ……*booom*

    Well… anyhow this worked out nice for the scientific standard pancake “SSPC”… which means not it work out nice for practical usage. How about more/less weight, bigger/smaller, sticky/non-sticky, lower/higher softness pancakes.

    Guess this is still very tricky to achieve since it requires heavy feedback considerations.

    I would say McDonalds workers are save for the next few years

  6. The only comment I have is in regards to the rigidity of that pancake! Have you ever seen one that rigid?! Nope? Me either.

    Flippin’ a floppy pancake is a whole different ballgame, heh. Great start, though.

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