Over at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering near Boston, Massachusetts, the students know what makes a worthwhile project. The AutoFrost is a robot which has one delicious purpose: frosting cakes.

The human operator enters some basic cake-stats, like size and color, and then hits the splendidly-worded go-button: "I'm ready to design an amazing cake". He is then dropped into a paint program with a circa-1990 interface, where the designing is done. This custom-coded app then controls the AutoFrost 'bot itself.

A pair of stepper motors and threaded rods move both the icing nozzle and the cake. They are controlled by two Arduinos and stepper motors. The frosting plunger is manually positioned at the right height over the tasty cake and the frosting is squeezed out using a servo motor on a rack and pinion system.

There's still a little work to be done (apart from slicing and eating the cake) – to change colors, a human has to swap on the new frosting before the AutoFrost can resume – but so what? It's a frikkin' robot that decorates cakes. If you watch the video all the way through you'll see that the icing on the cake, as it were, is when the 'bot finishes up its task by crossing the "t" and dotting the "i", just like the operator did when when designing the cake.

Future plans include different nozzle sizes, auto cake-size sensing, and more than a few brisk walks to combat calories gained in the name of research.

AutoFrost Cake Decorator [Olin via Oh Gizmo]

See Also: