I love grilling, but I’m no grillmaster. Overdone steaks and hamburgers are my specialty. Just ask my wife.
And you won’t catch me near the grill at a BBQ. It’s too nerve-wracking; cooking everything to people’s liking and timing out dishes can be tricky business.
That’s why this BratWurst Bot can be my grillmaster everyday of the week and twice on Sunday. The BratWurst Bot, created by FZI Living Lab Service Robotics for the 53rd Stallwachter-Party of the Baden-Wurttemberg State Representation in Berlin, consists of:
- One Universal Robots UR-10 arm
- One Schunk PG-70 standard parallel gripper
- Grill tongs
- A tablet with an ROS-based interface
Guests order sausages on the tablet, which then adds the order to a queue with the guests name on it and how long it’ll take to cook. Watch the video above and you’ll even see the BratWurst Bot turn the sausages multiple times to ensure they’re properly cooked.
Guests used a tablet and ROS-based interface to place orders.
The BratWurst Bot even wiggled its mustache when it served a sausage onto your plate, and it rattled off funny German sayings like ‘heiss und fettig’, which means “hot and greasy.”
According to FZI, “each bratwurst was localized with one of the two RGB cameras. A segmentation algorithm with background subtraction was used to localize the sausage on the grill. A special challenge was the changing color of the sausages. The robot used a mixture of previously taught trajectories and online planned trajectories.”
The BratWurst Bot autonomously grilled more than 200 sausages at the party.
