Evan Ackerman, IEEE Spectrum’s robotics editor and expert, reveals how robots have been cooking for diners in restaurants across the USA for quite some time now, and adds that “Food Service Robots Just Need the Right Ingredients” to get the job done.
Chef Robotics’ food service robots can replace humans on packaged meal assembly lines.
Chef Robotics
chef robotics food robots robotic manipulation robotics
Food prep is one of those problems that seems like it should be solvable by robots. It’s a predictable, repetitive, basic manipulation task in a semi-structured environment—seems ideal, right? And obviously there’s a huge need, because human labor is expensive and getting harder and harder to find in these contexts. There are currently over a million unfilled jobs in the food industry in the United States, and even with jobs that are filled, the annual turnover rate is 150 percent (meaning a lot of workers don’t even last a year).
Food prep seems like a great opportunity for robots, which is why Chef Robotics and a handful of other robotics companies tackled it a couple years ago by bringing robots to fast casual restaurants like Chipotle or Sweetgreen, where you get served a custom-ish meal from a selection of ingredients at a counter.
But this didn’t really work out, for a couple of reasons. First, doing things that are mostly effortless for humans are inevitably extremely difficult for robots. And second, humans actually do a lot of useful things in a restaurant context besides just putting food onto plates, and the robots weren’t up for all of those things.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE by Evan Ackerman ON IEEE SPECTRUM
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