Watch a Bratwurst-Grilling Robot Serve Up Perfectly Seared Sausages

Few foods are more quintessentially German than the bratwurst, a type of spiced, linked sausage that’s often made with minced pork and veal. At a recent government event in Berlin, Popular Science reports, officials served up the traditional staple with futuristic flair: They used a special bratwurst-grilling robot—fittingly dubbed the “BratWurst Bot”—to cook more than 200 sausages for guests.

The BratWurst Bot was created by the nonprofit FZI Research Center for Information Technology, located at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. On FZI’s website, they explain how the autonomous machine works: Simply request your order via a tablet, and you’ll be placed in a queue of waiting diners and receive real-time updates on your meal’s progress. As you wait for your dinner, you can watch the mesmerizing preparation process as BratWurst Bot’s metal arm expertly places uncooked sausages onto the grill, rotates them until they’ve achieved golden perfection, and dishes them out to hungry guests.

To imbue the BratWurst Bot with a little personality, FZI even created an animated, tablet-based “chef face” and positioned it behind the robot, Phys.org reports. As people stood in line, they were treated to playful banter as the “chef” announced order names and “commented [on] many of its actions with funny German sayings like ‘heiss und fettig,’ which literally translated means 'hot and greasy,'" FZI’s website states.

This isn’t the first time FZI has designed a high-tech food server for Germany’s government officials; last year, according to Engadget, they created a robot bartender. You can check out FZI's cocktail-mixing android on YouTube, or watch the BratWurst Bot in action above.

[h/t Popular Science]

Banner image courtesy of YouTube.

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