BratWurst Bot autonomously grills and serves German sausage

In order to create a practical robot design without any special fabrication, Germany-based firm Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI) has created one-armed sausage chef called BratWurst Bot. It is an impressive automatic grilling machine that can take up customer food orders, cook and serve sausages, without any human intervention.

What makes the robotic chef truly offbeat is the fact that it’s created entirely with off-the-shelf parts. Recently, BratWurst Bot made its debut at the 53rd Stallwächterparty (Stable Guard party) of the Federal government of Baden-Württemberg State in Berlin. At the event, FZI wanted to showcase that how conveniently an autonomous robot can interact with people, while serving them palatable food items.

The robotic chef is based on a Universal Robots UR-10 arm that’s equipped with Schunk PG-70 standard parallel gripper hand along with a standard pair of grill tongs. To give custom orders, different customers can use their tablet installed with ROS-based web frontend. The customer enters their name, adding up the queue. A second tablet is installed on the robot to synchronize with the customers’ tablet. This will help the robot to quickly start the preparation process and serve hot sausages as soon as possible.

The robotic chef also uses two RGB cameras and a segmentation algorithm with background subtraction to keep tab on cooking process. This way the robot can locate sausages on the supply tray and monitor them while cooking.

FZI has brilliantly demonstrated how the service industry may benefit from such robots in future. Check out the video to catch BratWurst Bot in action.