Rosie is most easily described as a stove, though she does so much more. Basically, Rosie is a stove that records your movements as you cook, and when you want the same meal in the future, you just select whatever you saved your meal as, say, meatloaf, and rosie goes to work. She is programmable, with pneumatic, or hydraulic, robotic arms. The trick is, how do you get the arms to mimic your movements, and how do you regulate what goes where?
Rosie has an oven and a stove top, but she also has a side table, where all the foodstuffs go initially. You are equipped with a sufficient set of cylinders, in which you place all your meats, precut vegetables, spices, oils, anything else in the recipe. You must record which items go in which cylinders, so Rosie dosent end up making meat batter, and marinated cookie dough. So, her arms are guided by your hands as you work, recording all the movements made, with proper timing, and any other ideosyncratic adjustments, the way you stir, things like this. When you are finished, you save the work, kinda like an excel macro, I guess. The next time you want meatloaf, you put the meat and bread and spices in the proper cylinders, and type "meatloaf", press "go" and come back in 2 hours, for an meatloaf just like you made last week. A true novelty for any avid cook.
And, if you order now, you get 50 saved Rosie meals, guided by some of the top chefs in the world. These Rosie Recipies were designed by the true professionals, and you can have them all, right in your house. Comes with supplemental cookbook, so you buy the exact recipies. Make sure you order the couples, or family recipies, depending on your household, as proportions cannot be manipulated.
Estimated Cost: $5000-- daseva, Jun 10 2004 Ah, a triumph for the ultra-lazy! I'd buy one for $5000 but I think I'd spend more on hiring the chefs to train it up. Now Rosie can know how to cook croissants.-- harderthanjesus, Jun 10 2004 Great! Why can't Rosie manipulate proportions?-- yabba do yabba dabba, Jun 10 2004 The movements are recorded EXACTLY. Simmering 1 pound of beed dosen't necessarily take half as long as two pounds. This is the major flaw with rosie. You can do whatever you want the first time, go to town, but you will have to precisely use the same proportions each additional time. Now you can program a pound meatloaf and a two pound one, that's perfectly fine, but you'll have to do a little work for it. Hopefully, the hard drive is big enough to store most of the common porportions, say 1/2, 1, 1/2, and 2 pound loafs, and have them at the ready when you buy her.-- daseva, Jun 10 2004 When programming movements avoid rubbing your eye or scratching your groin.-- FarmerJohn, Jun 10 2004 Good point [FarmerJohn], could result in a manslaughter charge.-- harderthanjesus, Jun 10 2004 I'm sure you could implement algorithms to account for larger portions, extra servings, etc. Or if not, you could make the same thing twice and store it as two different meals. No--the former.-- yabba do yabba dabba, Jun 10 2004 A nice idea, but I think you underestimate the difficulty of what you want the machine to do. Even a simple task like "flip the burger" is a very complex operation requiring a lot of intelligence and co-ordianation on the part of the machine. You have to locate where precisely in the pan the burger is; manipulate the spatula underneath it without cutting it in two; lift it up, being careful it doesn't topple off; and then perform a complicated lift-and-turn manouevre to get it on it's other side. These things are straightforward to humans, but hideously difficult to program in machines. If you can really manage to produce and sell these machines for $5000 then you would make a fortune. But I don't think you could make them for any money with today's technology.-- spacemoggy, Jun 10 2004 You see, there is no fliptheburger.exe like you're suggesting. there is only one program, to convert the original hand motions of the user into hydraulic movements. the machine processes nothing for cooking, only for movements. I see a problem tho, If you flip a burger and record it, theres a good chance the burger wont be in the exact same place the next time around, and it will be flipped right out of the pan... but, with the proper calibrations, using scales in the starting cyliners and such to regulate weights to a few grams or so, there shouldn't be much deveation among runs.-- daseva, Jun 10 2004 $5000? That's a whole lotta Rosie-- simonj, Jun 11 2004 having followed [sartep]'s link, I'm not so sure this idea is baked. the idea in the link uses voice commands, and doesn't seem to record your movements as you cook.
My only problem with [daseva]'s idea is that if it was pre-programmed with 50 recipes from the world's finest chefs, I'd be unlikely to ever cook for my elf ever again.
Still, overall, [+]-- Fishrat, Jun 11 2004 And then your poor elf would starve to death, ruining Christmas for millions of kids.-- harderthanjesus, Jun 11 2004 <old joke>"Every morning I have a 5 mile run followed by a cold shower, after which I feel rosy all over"Voice from back: "Who's Rosie?"</old joke>-- hippo, Jun 11 2004 Its a brilliant idea, and one wouldn't have to program it oneself. The programs wouldn't have to use large amounts of space, so tens of thousands of recipes could be added. Just put whatever you have in the hoppers and Rosie can search for matching recipies!-- Voice, Mar 18 2008 random, halfbakery