Misobot - When robotics, art and food get together - joined creation with the genius

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Back in 2016, our dear friends from MONOCHROM (organisers of the Hedonistika and Roboexotica robotic-art events, amongst other things), contacted the Genius, a.k.a. Daniel Schatzmayr, and asked him if he could make some sort of a soup-serving robot for the next Hedonistika event, which was held in my mother land Israel, of all places! So of course we said yes :D

After many different ideas thrown around, I had the concept for a miso soup robot and so the Misobot was born.

Once I made the original rough sketch of the bot and how it should work, the genius started with the actual planning, designing the construction in good old 2D fashion on #Autocad and later programming in C/C++ on #VisualStudio with the #VisualMicro addon.

We lasercutted the acrylic parts at our favourite lab, the Metalab, the 3D parts were printed at home on an Ormerod #RepRap and the caterpillar was created from cutting-boards, hand cutted with a table saw.

The robot includes:

3 x Geared DC motors
1 x 12V motor valve
1 x Servo

3 x Endstop sensor/buttons
1 x IR distance sensor
1 x I2C Weight sensor

2 knives (1 self-made out of a stainless steel sheet & 1 kitchen knife).

A few buttons for manual input.

Microcontroller (Arduino) Teensy 2.0

Electronics, some half-bridges and mosfets to drive the motors, put togehter in a google lunch box (just for the fun of it).

It took us about 3 weeks of work to finalise our beloved Misobot and take it to it's first exhibition in Israel.

The Hedonistika robotic-fun-interactive-exhibition, was a part of the Print Screen festival for digital art, in Holon.
I traveled there with our Misobot, together with the entire crazy robotic-artists group from Vienna and their wonderful robots, and operated it through out the days of the event.
It was pretty incredible to see the people's reactions to our robot, the fascination, the technical questions & the compliments for the delicious soup! :D

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YNet's (Israel's biggest news site) video covering the event

Since then, we've exhibited the Misobot in 2 Roboexotica events in Vienna & 1 Roboexotica in Graz & won the ACRA award for the best bar-food robot for 2 years in a row! (we were actually asked to exhibit it in several more international events, but had to decline due to utter lack of time ;D )

We are so proud of our little soup baby ^_^

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Now, what exactly does it do?

Once the participant places the soup bowl on the weight sensor plate, the robot detects it and automatically starts operating. The first knife cuts a slice of the tofu block, placed in the tofu dispenser. Then the bottom door of the dispenser opens just enough to allow the tofu slice to fall on to the caterpillar, which then starts moving. The big knife then cuts the tofu into small pieces and those fall directly into the soup bowl. Right then, the valve on the big pot of soup opens, and the soup is being poured, in the exact amount of 1 portion.

Watch the video here ^_^

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The whole concept behind artistic-robotic events like Roboexotica & Hedonistika, is to explore the relation between man and machine, in an interactive way that is working not only on our visual sense & sense of touch, but also on our sense of taste. The robots are all conceptual, and aside from being functional (or not, sometimes, that depends :D ), they also have their artistic value.

And what is the main thing we've learned from these events? That miso soup is the best thing to prevent hangovers! :D

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Misobot, by Daniel & Shlomit Schatzmayr, team DASH