A Useful Beer Robot

From time to time, you may have thought of ideas to make drinking beer more enjoyable.  If you are an engineer, you may have taken that a step further and created a robot to perform simple tasks for you.  It appears that the focus of most beer robots is to serve beer — an important task without a doubt.

PR2 Robot Fetches Beer From the Refrigerator

However, a few have gone a little further.  The engineers at Willow Garage modified one of their robots — PR2 — to fetch beer from the refrigerator and deliver it.  You can place your beer order via, the Internet, from a menu selection. Handy for sure — I don’t want to be presented with any of that lawnmower beer!  A good solid beer is what I like.  The robot also is programmed to ID a person’s face and will release the bottle once someone tugs on it.

All of the robots we know of are retrieving beer or dispensing beer, or both. But it’s time to look forward. Fetching and carrying are all passé. Vending machines have been dispensing things for years. So, to me, having a beer robot means it needs to look beyond the old boundaries to see what value could be added.

Here are a couple of thoughts that come to mind.

• Let you know if there are new selections available in the frig.
• Determine if your beer has been sitting around too long and is warm (you’re talking too much).
• ID the beer and go get a fresh cold one.
• Politely and discretely, let you know when you are approaching your limit.
• Removes your keys and finds you a place to stay for the night if you have exceeded your drinking limit. Could be handy when your parties are lively and there are more people there than you can keep track.  Sort of a Robot bouncer at the door for guests that are trying to leave and drive drunk.

In the meantime, it would be great to have the PS2 for Tuesday beer nights.  We could simply put is our order for the beer of the night, and the robot could deliver us in style.

Let us know what new values a beer robot could add that would make it more than just an expensive vending machine.