RoDyMan

Have you ever thought about the complexity of making pizzas? Stretching the dough, tossing, seasoning, baking with dynamic turning. It is a real art. A robot – named RoDyMan – will soon have the required dexterity to reproduce this gastronomic choreography. This original and challenging idea was born in the mind of a leading scientist in robotics, Prof. Bruno Siciliano, and is funded by the European Research Council (ERC)

RoDyMan – the acronym for Robotic Dynamic Manipulation – is a service robot that will be able to mimic complex human tasks with a level of dexterity and mobility never seen before. “The manipulation of non-rigid, deformable objects – food or clothes in our daily lives, soft tissues such as muscles and skin in medical operations – has not been much investigated so far and offers an important challenge to the robotics community”.

RoDyMan will be composed of a torso, two lightweight arms and multi-fingered hands. It will not have legs but it will be rather mounted onto an omni-directional platform with wheels. Its head will be equipped with a stereo camera system and a structured lighting set up. It will have proximity and range sensors, as well as tactile sensors.

In the next five years, RoDyMan’s challenge is to make pizzas. The degustation is planned in 2017.