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Wine Tasting Robot

We've seen a lot of news stories about robots that can bring their owners a beer, or bartender robots that can pour a drink - some of them even made out of Legos. But they usually have no idea what type of alcoholic beverage they are delivering. It could be beer, vodka, tap water, or motor oil - they have no idea, and don't really care - they just go through the motions.

A new experimental robot developed by Professor Atsushi Hashimoto of Mie University and the NEC robotics group fixes that shortcoming. They've developed a 'sommelier' robot that can actually sample and identify wines. 

The robot uses a sensor that irradiates a sample of the wine with infrared light, analyzes the ingredients, and compares the results with it's database.

The robot can successfully identify 30 different samples and typically reports it's results along with details like the origin of the wine and it's attributes within a half a minute. Currently the robots taste sensor is mounted in a small tray connected to the robot, but work is underway to miniaturize it to incorporate it into the robots hand (since the robot doesn't have a mouth or tongue...).

It isn't limited to just identifying types of wines, and can be also used to distinguish the sweetness of an apple, the kind of cheese, and other similar tests.

Related links:

NEC Develops Sommelier Robot (Japanese)

Posted by Lem on July 29, 2006 | Permalink | Email this post

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This is a novel application of a wine analysis technology which is used in some of the wine industry labs. The calibration of that lab instrument is non-trivial.

While this sommelier robot is rating my wine... I'll rate the robot.

Cuteness factor: 8
Ingenuity: 5
Usefulness: 3
I'm still waiting for a robot that can tell me if this wine it's 'tasting' is any good. Not enough for it to tell me which varietal is in the bottle. I wanna know if the wine is gonna please my palate.

Sorry guys. This robot is a long ways off from being my sommelier.

Posted by: Gene Pool | Sep 5, 2006 12:44:07 AM

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