Without a Traceroute

Roboexotica is fantastic. There are a lot of really interesting, creative robot designs, and most of them pour a pretty good, strong cocktail as well. Here’s a sampling of a few of the bots. I’m going to try to get better photographs of the others and I’ll probably post some sort of all-bot roundup later. NOTE: MINOR NSFW WARNING

Mojitomatic

This wonderful contraption makes mojitos. As you can see, it’s very ambitious and, unlike some of the other designs which require user-input, aims to totally automate the mojito-creation process. If anything, it might be slightly too ambitious because it has a tendency to jam or break down, but when it works, it works well and produces a very refreshing drink.

Lego Mindstorms put to good use

This robot takes legos, the toys we all remember fondly from our childhood and puts them into service making screwdrivers. The guy sitting to the right of the robot is its creator, an MIT-educated American who used to work for Lego Mindstorms. I remember when I was a kid my parents got me a Mindstorms kit for Christmas one year, but it was during a period when I’d decided I was too old to “play with legos” and so I never did much with it. Oh, if only I had considered the possibilities…

The rimshot-bot

This bot doesn’t actually make drinks, but it does provide another essential cocktail-party service: playing rimshots after the punchlines of terrible jokes. It has two modes, an auto-joke mode where it tells its own bad jokes (“Take my wife, please”) in a synthesized-robot voice and playing accompanying rimshots. It also has a manual mode where the user (its creator, in this photo) can trigger rimshots as needed with a small wireless remote. Earlier in the evening, we’d been trying to explain the meaning of ‘that’s what she said’ to a native German-speaker, and the Rimshot-bot would’ve been most helpful.

The NSFW-bot

This bot combines old-school punchcard computing with old-old-school dick jokes. The user first punches holes in a card, then inserts that card into a slot on the wall behind the mannequin, and pulls a comically-oversized lever. The marks made on the card determine through a secret, proprietary algorithm what type of drink the user receives. The drink is then peed out into a waiting cup. Sadly, in this photo the card-apparatus and lever are mostly obscured, but I liked it because the girl managed to look mildly skeeved-out by the robot, but is still DRINKING A DRINK THAT JUST CAME FROM HIS PLASTIC WANG.

3D-printing shotglasses

This was arguably the most high-tech of any of the robots. It’s a homebuilt 3D-printer design, put to good use here creating shotglasses from molten, non-toxic plastic. It took about 20 minutes to complete an individual shotglass, and every one has its own unique imperfections.

Chassis the beer-serving bot

This guy might be my favorite bot of the show so far, mostly because it corresponds closely to what everyone imagines when you say “drink-serving robot”. Also, it pours beer, which I like. Basically, it roams around the room carrying glasses, and you can put your glass under the spigot in the middle to get a nice cup of beer. It’s not very autonomous, the whole thing is remote-controlled, but it’s much more mobile than most of the other designs. I like the retro-futuristic styling, and it has a few really nice little touches. The “mouth” of the bot is actually a gauge that shows how much beer is left in the keg, and the bot also includes microphone/speaker that communicates with a wireless headset so the bot can talk to people. Last night, Johannes from Monochrom was singing a surprisingly passable version of the Terminator theme over the headset (“Dah-dah-dah-duh-DAH!”).

If you live in California, you can hire Chassis to appear at your own party. Note to Pomona College administrators: This would be a better use of funds than Death-By-Chocolate.