UCSD Biometric Vending Machine

dice writes to tell us that grad students at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are creating the first biometric vending machine. The current machine comes equipped with a barcode scanner, a fingerprint reader, and a web cam for facial recognition. One student dubbed it the "most over-designed soda machine in the world." The project, code-named "SodaVision," is the brainchild of associate professor Stefan Savage, but it was the students who really made it come to life. And yes, it runs Linux.

Comments

gone!

[LotsOfPhil]

Not only is the article slashdotted, so is their site, http://sodavision.com/. The latter has a few more details.

Re:*sighs*

[Skim123]

I was a CS grad student at UCSD from 2001-2003. What they had when I was there was something called CafeBob or something like that. It had the barcode scanner. You'd enter your name, scan the item, and it would "deduct" the cost from your account. You could "credit" your account by putting money in a box and then, from the computer, keying in that you deposited X dollars. Very trusting. It was a "co-op" vending machine/system - students would take money from the box to go buy the sodas, snacks, and so on (IIRC).

I guess now they're taking out the part where you entered your ID and password, and replacing it with a biometric scanner. But, if this is in the same CS grad student lounge, the barcode scanner and basic inventory software has been in place for some time now.

Re:afraid to vote..

[qewl]

Politians come in similar shrink-wrapped, advertisement laden, deceptive packages. It's easy to get them confused.

Useful? We think so :-)

[StefanSavage]

Seriously, I suppose usefulness is in the eye of the beholder, but from my rather pragmatic standpoint the machine has one very important use: it allows me to get a coke with very little effort (while differentiating my debts from those of others). There's really nothing more to it that that. I think people are looking for something deep, or new a new product category, or some groundbreaking science... move on... you won't find it here.

This project really had two goals: make it easy to buy soft drinks from our grad student co-op and have fun building a real artifact.

The latter part -- having fun -- is underappreciated. Really, the students had a great time putting the pieces together... they had to design and build an interface board to Vendo's control bus, they had to build a UI (that student was a ST:TNG fan so the interface mimics the screens from the series), they had to interface it to our MySql database that holds user accounts, etc. It was a real esprit de coeur project and one in which everyone had alot of fun. Once it was working, people started adding other components: a 2d bar code scanner (not used for soda, contrary to the article, but for candy and other goods), they added visual recognition (and there is a banana detector in the works to register purchase of bananas), there is a voice synthesizer that can say "Shame" out loud if your cash balance in the co-op goes negative, there is even a student who has been talking about door-to-door delivery using a robot, etc.

I suspect if we had called it a "case mod", people would have had understood the spirit in which it was built.

Re:*sighs*

[Lux]

They're making Bob less trusting, in part because money had always been slowly leaking away due to theft or negligence in payment.

To correct the grandparent, it seems that you have to authenticate *before* the machine will vend a soda, which agrees with some announcements I noticed on the department mailing lists. (I'm not at UCSD any more, but I still get the e-mail.) I suspect the scanning is just for inventory tracking, not payment. Maybe the maintainers get an e-mail whenever x Mt. Dews get dispensed after the most recent restocking. They probably just didn't want to hack the vending machine any deeper to track per-soda purchasing.

Chez Bob

[ShakaUVM]

Heya Stefan,

I (Bill Kerney) was a grad student in CS at UCSD until '01 or '02 or so under Scott Baden.

For those who don't know, the Chez Bob computer was the most overengineered ledger in the history of ledgers. Every year some student would hack it to do something new and unusual. When I was there, they:
1) Added passwords (which were not really needed since the fridge door wasn't locked or anything if you wanted to steal something)
2) Added text to speech.
3) Added a saying it could say whenever you logged in. I enjoyed making up random latin phrases, which it would read in its stately mechanical voice.
4) Added a barcode reader.
5) Barcode reader was integrated into text to speech. "BOUGHT. ONE. TIGERS. MILK." Awesome.

And I think it also did stock alerts, sending an email to the Chez Bob Coordinator Alan Su when they were running low on something. Since we had a few people in the department who did Battlebots at the time, there were some people working on building a delivery robot that would pull the item out of the fridge, drive down the corridor and deliver the item. I think the main stumbling block was that they couldn't figure out how to open the doors (which had passcodes, and I think were difficult to open anyway for a robot).

For those who don't know Stefen Savage, check the archives on Slashdot, going back at least to '98 or so when he published his doctoral thesis (IIRC) on tracking DDOS attacks by looking at spurious ACKs coming into an unused block of IP space. He's had a lot of interesting ideas that Slashdot has covered. If my memory hasn't gone fuzzy, he also tought a computer gaming class at UCSD (which I enjoyed helping my friend (Scott O'Neil) with as I'd worked in the gaming industry for a couple years).