No, we are not talking about AI applications ready to draw pictures or put together videos with almost impossibly beautiful and presumably tasty meals. We mean hard metal robots grilling your meat, frying your fries to perfection, filling your soda glasses, or readying your morning coffee. They are already here!
From restaurants…
Joining forces with PopID – a technology company that uses your face for simplified access, ordering, and payment, MisoRobotics just launched the first fully automated restaurant: CaliExpress as part of CaliGroup.
For those of you who didn’t know, MisoRobotics produces several types of robots that can take over the repetitive tasks in a fast-food restaurant.
It all started with Flippy, a smart commercial kitchen robot that fries items from french fries to chicken nuggets. Then we got Flippy Lite – a more compact version of Flippy that is designed to focus on a single product that needs to be dispensed, cooked, seasoned, and mixed, such as chicken wings, chips, and French fries. Now there is also Flippy 2, who is simply an improved version of Flippy that performs more than twice as many food preparation tasks compared to the previous version, including basket filling, emptying, and returning. Add to this mix Sippy, the automated drink dispenser which almost doubles drink service speed, and Cook Right – an AI-powered cooking platform developed by Miso Robotics that allows chefs to track a food item on a grill and monitor cooking time automatically to deliver precision-level cooking.
The new restaurant can be found at 561 E. Green Street near Madison Avenue in Pasadena, California. For the moment, it offers a simple menu, consisting of a hamburger, cheeseburger or lettuce wrap accompanied by fries and a drink.
The happy owners consider the restaurant a revolutionary safety breakthrough as both slippage and burns are all but eliminated, on top of waste reduction or both food and oil used during the process.
“The CaliExpress by Flippy kitchen can be run by a much smaller crew, in a less stressful environment, than competing restaurants — while also providing above average wages,” the group said.
The location is also set up as a techno-exhibition, presenting a timeline of Flippy’s development, including prototypes of its robotic arms, photographic displays, and other 3-D printed artifacts, encouraging customers – especially the young ones – to interact with them.
…to your kitchen
Still, having a meal in an automated restaurant isn’t really about those Hollywood-type of robots doing your chores back at home. But they are coming, too.
Enters Figure-01 humanoid robot – the world’s first commercially-viable autonomous humanoid robot. It is a 5’6″ high (that’s roughly 1.70 m), 60 kg machine able to carry 20 kg payloads at speeds of up to 1.2 m/s and for a total of 5 hours.
But the carrying and walking stuff is not important. Figure 1 can make your morning coffee, adapting to your specific machine. Just watch:
And, as everybody already knows, a god cup of coffee is a great way to start anything. The best part? Nobody programmed Figure 1 to do it. It simply observed a human operator making coffee, then it tried until got it right. Now please someone teach it how to fry bacon and make some scrambled eggs.
We can’t wait to see Figure 1 cooking, serving, and doing the dishes. All of the above within the time frame of its 5 hrs of autonomy.
Satisfied? Are these the robots you were looking for?
