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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: 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