His name is Rodyman and he makes a perfect Neapolitan pizza: mixes the ingredients, stretches the dough, and seasons, bakes, and serves up a delicious “Pizza Margherita”. The news is, Rodyman is a Robot.
Rodyman is the result of Neapolitan professor Bruno Siciliano’s experienced team of robotic engineers working at the world-renowned laboratory of robotics ‘Prism Lab’, supported by the European Research Council. Rodyman is an acronym for Robotic Dynamic Manipulation, a project to create a service robot with the ability to conduct activities with a level of dexterity and mobility never seen before. Robots like Rodyman could be used to give assistance to the elderly or to repair human hearts. “‘Til now – explained Bruno Siciliano, – the manipulation of deformable objects, such as food or clothing, or soft tissues like muscles or the skin in surgical interventions, has not been studied enough; this represents a true challenge for robotics”.
Rodyman will have a torso, two light arms and two hands with multiple fingers. Deprived of legs, he will be mounted on a multidirectional base placed on wheels. The head will be endowed with stereoscopic videocameras, movement sensors, and a structured system of lights.
According to its planners, Rodyman will be able to interact perfectly with human beings, and to copy human gestures and movements.
“The preparation of the pizza is a pretext that hides the concept of manipulation”, says Siciliano, who is professor of the Department of Automatic Electrical Engineering and Technologies at the Federico II University of Naples. “Robots already replace us in a lot of fields, but in industrial robotics, the devices for grasping have been limited to pliers or to hands with three fingers that succeed in interacting with solid objects. We want to take robotics into the future through discovering how the human hand works when it contacts and manipulates deformable objects, and reproduce this sensitive aspect of the human hand”.
This is a sector in which Italy occupies a prominent position. The Neapolitan University is among the Italian flagships of this work, along with Genoa, Bologna, Pisa and Rome. The Rodyman project started last June, upon being awarded €2.5 million for a five year period, which will conclude in 2018. Nevertheless it remains difficult to secure the funds required to implement these projects.
Of course the aim of the robot is not to make pizza, even if, as professor Siciliano recalled, “we asked one of the best Neapolitan pizza makers to wear a bio-kinetic suite, endowed with sensors and systems able to capture 3D movement, in order to learn the human movements required to prepare and cook the best pizza”.
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