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from the too-lazy-to-take-care-of-ourselves dept.
The world's first robotic kitchen prepares crab bisque for breakfast:
A couple of weeks ago, I was invited along to a warehouse in north London to see what is being billed as "the world's first automated kitchen." The system, made by Moley Robotics in the UK, can only make crab bisque right now—and it requires that all of the ingredients and utensils are pre-positioned perfectly. The goal, though, is to have a consumer-ready version within two years, priced at around £10,000 ($14,600). The company envisions an "iTunes style library of recipes" that you can download and have your robot chef prepare.
In its current form, the Moley Robotic Kitchen is essentially two very expensive robotic arms, with two even dearer fully articulated biomimetic humanoid hands made by the Shadow Robot Company on the ends. In front of the robot is a kitchen—a sink, a stovetop, an oven, and a range of utensils, including the aforementioned blender. The ingredients are placed in bowls and cups on the worktop. Once everything is set up, an engineer simply presses "start" on the controlling PC, the robot arms whirl around for 30 minutes, and voilà: crab bisque.
Simply stunning. Fresh from the arms of your android girlfriend, you awake from a coding/WoW binge to a delicately prepared breakfast of crab bisque. Geek nirvana, here we come!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @11:46PM
Yeah, if this robot needs everything set in the precise right starting locations, then it could just be following a fixed set of instructions.
Factory-style robots to make food on a smaller scale are interesting because they could replace restaurant kitchens. I remember seeing a company trying to sell one that made fancy burgers cheaply, but it's not cheap enough to replace fast food workers yet. I could see low-end restaurants getting automated as such things get cheaper and wages go up (fast food jobs are awful jobs; it's better for everyone if they get automated out of existence). Higher-end restaurants will probably pride themselves on having humans prepare the food and there are some hard problems there in selecting quality ingredients and adjusting to exactly what you have available that a skilled human can perform but getting a robot to perform the same task is both difficult and doesn't have a clear short-term profit motive. In the long-term, whoever can sell a $10k robot that can prepare gourmet restaurant quality meals in your home is going to make a lot of money.
Which leads into what makes a "robot" interesting separate from a "factory", since, as you point out, they aren't all that different. I would say that for household use, the robot would be something that can work with an existing kitchen (and therefore have to be able to handle a wide variety of kitchens) and can be put in a closet when not in use (so it can't be a big immovable hunk of steel). I see a lot of research showing simple kitchen tasks as example tasks for a robot and they're getting better... but they still aren't very good. Two years to commercialization is unbelievably optimistic. Two years to a research demo in controlled circumstances would be impressive.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday April 16 2015, @10:52AM
Higher-end restaurants will probably pride themselves on having humans prepare the food and there are some hard problems there in selecting quality ingredients and adjusting to exactly what you have available that a skilled human can perform but getting a robot to perform the same task is both difficult and doesn't have a clear short-term profit motive
I can imagine that even in a decent restaurant there's a lot in a kitchen that could be automated. Larger restaurants have a number of workers in the kitchen doing fairly menial tasks (chopping, cleaning vegetables, stirring, and so on) that could all be automated.
sudo mod me up