My forever project is a cooking robot. I've been thinking about how I'd approach it for years, but never had the chance to make what I thought would be a worthwhile start.
That is awesome. That's the ultimate DRY (don't repeat yourself) thing humanity needs. It will free us from all the work required to raise the quality of our food, making eating well as easy as fast food.
My personal touchstone for the beginning of the true Robot Age is a fully-automated McDonald's or equivalent being seriously deployed not as a tech demo, but because it is the best solution. Supplies in one end, someone carting the waste out the other, and everything else, including cleaning, should be done by the robot itself. (Though perhaps I'll bend on the cleaning. That does add another very significant level of complexity.)
Robots will be cheaper eventually. And very easily reprogrammed.
For me the goal is not cheap food but quality food.
And the most expensive part of going out for many people? Driving there, if you consider the cost of their time.
Ultimately, we will get robotic vehicles to do that part too. We will see some very small vehicles once robotic vehicles are commonplace, perhaps delivering only a single meal.
And we'll also see robotic cooks that can cook anything, so they may become so common you won't need to drive to them.
I would love to have a cooking robot because I don't like to spend time cooking. I worked on a related project, an automatic bartender: http://youtu.be/iqvUJ6vvzxk as a group project in one of my classes.
Thanks! The blog is on the todo list.. I'm preparing some presentations for next month so that might be the kickoff. For now I've just put up a FB page for a first device: https://www.facebook.com/vaporware.robot
The stars aligned this year, and I'm actually able to work on it now. This is the current temperature of my stove: http://dave-stuff.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/