Unfortunately, as the following video demonstrates, the sushi-making robots still need humans just a little. “Just a little” meaning humans must rinse, cook, and season the rice, prep the vegetables, and cut the nori to the right size, slice the fish, and layer it all onto the machine-made slabs of rice or rice-on-nori. Suzumo’s bots then produce maki that seem oddly familiar to anyone who’s ever used a cigarette-rolling machine. As this Suzumo video shows, all it takes to produce robo sushi is a technician in a lab coat and an audio track that goes from Olympics-scale anthem to disco to a funk groove that must have been laid down by Chuck Mangione’s session guys:
Doesn’t really look that much easier than rolling maki with a bamboo mat. Or, for that matter, a Tupperware set and a techno soundtrack:
Via Wired and MSNBC Tech