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Bots play bartender at Roboexotica Festival in Vienna
Robots have way too many roles these days, ranging from security sentries to cellphone salesbots. Too mundane, you say? What about something that will surely please everyone at your party: a bot that can play bartender? Even better. Lucky for all of us with who fantasize about a world that involves inebriation through computation, the who's who of bartender bots expo recently took place in Vienna, at the 7th annual Roboexotica Festival. Wired News had a man on the scene, who drank up a mojito served up by the Robomoji (pictured), and watched another called Chapok make a gin and juice. While he wasn't getting liquored up, he managed to get in a few interviews with some of the masterminds behind these concoctions (the robots themselves were too shy), and spoke with the creator of Chapok, David Calkins, a professor of robotics at San Francisco State University. "Once all the robotics researchers here and elsewhere have worked out all the basic problems, that's when it takes off, and robots wind up in every household," he said. Well in that case, once these robots can make a decent White Russian, we'll sign up for the first beta home trials straightaway. Check the next page for a video of Robomoji in action from last year's show.
