Service robots in the field – a robot and two barkeepers successfully mix cocktails as a cooperative human-robot team at the Stallwachter-Party 2015 in Berlin.
Robot HoLLiE uses its two anthropomorphic 5-Finger-Hands (SCHUNK SVH) to grasp cocktail glasses and fill them with various ingredients. The left and right robot-arms moved independently.
During the Stallwachter-Party in Berlin on 9 July 2015, HoLLiE mixed two different cocktails: “Bramble Fizz”, a gin based fruit cocktail, and “digit.HoLLiE”, a whisky long drink with lemonade. The recipes were created by Gregor Scholl, Phum Sila-Trakoon and the team from the bar “Le Croco Blue” in Berlin. HoLLiE assisted the human barkeeper colleagues for more than 7.5 hours and mixed more than 280 cocktails. Thanks to the use of fast and reliable industrial light-weight arms and an improved motion control system, some cocktails were ready after 61 seconds.
The guests ordered their drinks via tablet-computer. Then, the robot mixed the cocktails and informed the guests when the ordered cocktails were ready. Besides, HoLLiE asked its barkeeper colleagues for help when there were no more empty glasses or ingredients.
Besides the great taste of the cocktails, the human-like 5-Finger-Hands definitely were a highlight of the demonstration. HoLLiE demonstrated that a robot can successfully perform dexterous manipulation tasks in a complex and difficult environment that is originally not suited for robots. Researchers at the FZI had developed the drivers for the SVH robot hand, which reliably grasped even wet glasses in spite of smaller drops of liquid on its fingers.