Microsoft’s Newest Robot Can Fetch Beer For You

This is the moment we all have been waiting for – a robot that can fetch you some beer. Microsoft finally used AI and computing to turn fantasies into reality and unveiled this robot at the 2018 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit.

The tech company’s Strategic Prototyping Team introduced the “Receptionist Assistant Robot,” which has been created to help receptionists stay in one place in the building and get more tasks completed with its aid.

The robot can assist to help in completing their daily tasks such as fetching beverages from the fridge. It can also sense when the receptionist needs help, provide them with information from its database, interact with visitors and answer their queries too.

A combination of local and cloud processing is used in the robot for image recognition and motion planning. As a consequence, it can accomplish much more than the robots used in an industrial setting where tasks are repetitive in nature.

This assistant can figure out the situation in real-time and take appropriate actions. David Baumert, a member of the prototyping team, explained that it runs simulations to figure out the responses.

This data is then used to generate commands to form a specific sequence of actions needed to get the task completed. Depending upon whether the computation is done locally or remotely, the actions can be speeded up significantly.

There is still a lot of scope for improvement in this robot both in terms of its performance and cost. Hopefully, we can afford such beer-fetching robots in the future. Would you like to get one? Drop your thoughts in the comment box below!

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