We here at Hackaday are big fans of the useless machine, there is undoubtedly something amusing about watching a gadget flare dramatically without actually making any progress towards a defined goal. But what happens when one of these meme machines works very well? We think that’s exactly what we might witness with Tacobot from here [Vije Miller].
On top of that, creating a wide range of robotic contraptions to create (slowly) tacos is definitely ridiculous. Twice as much when you deal with the need to give it voice commands as it is a one-of-a-kind version. Star Trek Food replicator. The whole thing sounds like a setup for a joke, a guess that gets stronger after watching the dramatic video at break. But in the end, we still can’t figure out how well the thing is working.
Later [Vije] Giving it a list of components to deliver, a robotic arm drops a tortilla on a nicely articulated rolling platform that can not only rotate and move in two dimensions, but create a soft shell in the appropriate taco configuration. The empty shell is then brought under a rotating dispenser which removes (or at least tries) the requested ingredients such as beef, onion, cheese and lettuce. With one final improvement, it pumps out a few pumps of the selected sauce and then presents the complete taco to the user.
The only failure is seen to be the ability of the machine to distribute some components. Ground beef seems to fall into place without any problems, but it apparently fights wet foods like tomatoes and onions. We just know that if a robot gave us a taco with that little lettuce, we would have a problem. On the project page [Vije] Acknowledges the problem and says that a redesigned dispenser can help fix some of the problems.
The problem immediately comes to mind with an interesting series of posts dedicated to handling bulk material written by our own [Anne Ogborn]. While the app here may be a bit tongue-in-cheek, it’s still a perfect example of the interesting phenomenon you encounter when trying to measure a variety of instruments.
Thanks [Fiona] For the tip