Sorry, beerbot developers, you probably won't be able to get Pentagon funding for your alcohol-serving machines. Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona has introduced a new section to the US Department of Defense appropriations bill, which says: "None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be obligated or expended for the development of a beerbot or other robot bartender." Okay, so the soon-to-retire lawmaker doesn't want the government to fund the development of silly robotic bartenders. Problem is, as IEEE Spectrum explained, he singled out a robot MIT researchers developed in 2015, which wasn't designed to be a beerbot at all. When he made his argument on the Senate floor on August 21st, he targeted the MIT research, because it was partially funded by the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force.

Last Thursday, Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona introduced the following amendment to the U.S. Department of Defense appropriations bill currently in Congress: None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be obligated or expended for the development of a beerbot or other robot bartender. This sounds like a joke, but it's not: Legislation prohibiting Department of Defense funding of robot bartenders is on its way to becoming law. The reason why Senator Flake wants this to become law is based, at best, on a misunderstanding of how basic robotics research works. At worst, it's a deliberate decision to misrepresent the research for political gain. In 2015, MIT researchers presented a paper at the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference on "Policy Search for Multi-Robot Coordination under Uncertainty" [PDF].