Speaker 1: Hello, my fellow humans today, we are looking at actual robot chefs that can cook for us in the kitchen. Oh, that's so sweet of you. I meant robots that can actually use ovens and knives. Not just hand me a sandwich, but I appreciate the gesture.
Speaker 2: Metron
Speaker 1: Everyone wants to talk about how robot assistance will be in our future [00:00:30] homes, doing chores, like taking care of the dishes, picking up after us, messy humans, helping us unwind after a hard day of doing our human things. But I'm sorry to break it to you. That future is not gonna be real for a while. And certainly not at a practical cost. I mean, Amazon did show off this little Astro robot it's working on, and even he is more of a camera on wheels, but the help of robots that you are going to interact with today, the ones that are rising in popularity, [00:01:00] these are robots and food service. The most common are robots at restaurants, they're handling meal prep in the back. Some are bringing the meal to your seat and although it's not always perfect, we are at the point where people can order a working robot chef for their home kitchen.
Speaker 1: I wanted to go through, introduce you to the tech that's out there, because if you're going to make a robot friend today, it's most likely a robot that's going to feed you. Let's start with the luxury dream. Having a robot, make a home cooked meal. Earlier [00:01:30] this year in London, moly robotics went all out and showed us what a fully robotic kitchen would look like. Preparing freshly cooked meals from start to finish. This is a product that took six years to develop and it's on sale. Now at the center of the system are two robotic arms with fully articulated robot hands. And with those hands, it can retrieve ingredients from the fridge units above it can fit pans and utensils and pour things and mix things it, and [00:02:00] even plate it. It's doing all the things that I can't stand about cooking, which is the cooking.
Speaker 1: So great. Awesome. But wait, who is putting everything in those containers? Yes. You, the human still have to do the prep work before you begin. There is a touch screen that guides you on what ingredients you need to shop up for the dish. You have to measure the right amount of each item, and then you put those ingredients and spa special containers until the computer, which items are in which containers for the robot hands to grab during the [00:02:30] cooking right now, moly knows 30 different meals. And the company has goals of continuously adding thousands of more recipes, and you can teach it your own family favorites. It's loaded with cameras and sensors and the system maps where all the cookware is and all the utensils are located. The handles and the pans. They all have this special design on them. They're designed for the moly robots.
Speaker 1: They have these markings to help the robot identify each item. Are you ready for [00:03:00] the price moly list? This as starting at 248,000 pounds, or when converted, that's more than $341,000. Holy moly. So maybe that's out of your price range. Now when you pay all that, you would hope you didn't have to do any of the prep work. Right? Well, folks at moley tell me they could teach this robot to do the chopping, but it's too complex and costly to make that happen. So the company's working on a ready prepped [00:03:30] meal kit. So everything's measured out ahead of time and pre prepped and it's mailed directly to the customer. So you can order a week's worth of meals in advance or moly to cook later this year, moly says it will be announcing a version of these arms that will work in commercial use. So maybe even if you don't have it in your own home, you can see these arms at work at restaurants or cooking up orders at upscale resort, lounges, moly.
Speaker 1: Isn't the only one with robot arms. This is the bot chef by Samsung. [00:04:00] And Samsung says, it's trying to get to this point where robot arms are not at a cost that is totally out of reach. Maybe someday we could think of it as the same as an expensive refrigerator, rather than a small yacht. The Samsung bought chef was shown off at CES 2020. And this does something the moly does not do yet. It reels the blade for merciless tofu chopping. It can turn on the stove top. It can pick up a bottle of olive oil. It can pour it into the pan and it can even open [00:04:30] up cabinets and give you some hot sauce. But wait, how did the tofu get on the counter and who put the tofu in the pan? Okay. So Samsung's bot chef is more of a helper than a full service chef.
Speaker 1: So humans need to be working in the kitchen next to the robot. But if a human arm does get in the way of a knife, Samsung says it will be smart enough to stop moving because no one wants robot murder salad. I mean, what's the point of tofu [00:05:00] if you give everywhere, right? But seriously, we need to address the tofu because it is one thing to chop a cube of soft mush, but chopping veggies itself is a very difficult task to teach a robot because when you're chopping the pressure, you're exerting on the chop changes as the knife breaks through. As you can see in this video, demonst straight by researchers at Iowa state university, where a team tried to teach a robot, how to chop an onion and a potato. I mean, I'm pretty [00:05:30] horrible at shopping, but this has given me great self-esteem.
Speaker 1: So if chopping veggies is a bit too complicated right now, robots have found success with flipping robot. Arms are now working the fryer and the grill at restaurant chains. This is flippy by meso robotics. It uses computer vision and temperature sensors to cook hamburgers. It had a bit of a rough start when it began its career at cer, there were reports of it being turned off after one day on the job and humans had to learn to choreograph [00:06:00] their movements around the bot to put the burger on the grill without getting in the way of the arm. But that didn't stop flippy. In fact, flippy use continued to grow. It started frying, all sorts of foods at Dodgers stadium, like chicken tenders and tater tots and, and the robot arm also now has a gig at white castle. Flippy got a sibling called wingy and that's in development now to cook chicken wings at Buffalo, wild wings, Misa robotics has an updated version of [00:06:30] the flippy.
Speaker 1: It's a brand new flippy, two, it's a slightly slimmer model. It handles more tasks. Now a computer sensor can tell what kind of food is in the basket. And it picks up the basket, drops it in the hot oil. And when it senses that it's done, it's gonna pick the food back up and dump it on a slide wee down. It goes, and it moves the hot basket back. And if that doesn't seem impressive, just no it's all done to eliminate some human contact. So humans don't have to hot oil baskets like before [00:07:00] and miso robotics says this can handle cooking 60 baskets of food an hour. This ramp up of robots and food service can help ease staffing challenges. During the current labor shortage. The national restaurant association reports that four to five restaurants right now are understaffed and flippy costs the strong $5,000 to install.
Speaker 1: And from there, it would be an additional $3,000 or so a month. Now the idea is if you insert a robot in a repetitive job, [00:07:30] you could get humans to do other human E service better, but it's only good if it actually saves time, right? Some robot kitchen jobs don't make a lot of sense to me, check out this pizza making robot by picnic, a human puts the dough on the conveyor belt. And with this modular system, it's dropping down the sauce, the cheese, the toppings, as it rolls on through each section. But if you got a module for every single topping option, well, [00:08:00] that can get a bit nuts. So you're limited, I guess, into what you offer customers. And when we saw a demo in action at the CES trade show in 2020, it looked good, but it sure felt very slow compared to what a human could do.
Speaker 1: That was a demo, but it has been put to work in real situations. The system has gotten practiced feed Mariners fans at the T-Mobile park baseball stadium. And just a few weeks ago, the company picnic announced that it's sold out a pre-sales of these machines and it's [00:08:30] gonna be delivering systems to customers. In the first half of 2022, a customer would pay around 3,500 to $5,000 a month as a subscription service to rent out this system. There is one pizza joint in New Jersey that wants to make this robot, the star of its business. The restaurant is called pizza HQ. It has a bunch of these machines that feed directly into ovens, and there's this whole plan to have the pizzas cut and boxed and then put in a van. And that van takes your hot [00:09:00] pizzas to a hot pizza locker. And the customers will track them on an app and go pick up the heated pizzas in the locker.
Speaker 1: As a pickup point, it's a lot of automation with some human mixed in, but we'll have to wait until early 2022 to see how it works. When pizza HQ opens. Now, this conveyor belt system is picking up in other areas over in Boston, MIT grads created a robot restaurant called spice. They call this the infinite kitchen is cooking and [00:09:30] steaming different ingredients. And as your bowl travels down, the machine it's dropping down. The ingredients needed for each custom order. The process can get a bowl together in two to three minutes, and it said to handle 300 bowls an hour, but soon you may not have to travel to Boston to see it in action, because spice was just acquired by the salad chain, sweet green and sweet green said it wants to incorporate this tech into its location. The other area you're gonna run into robots and food service is robot servers.
Speaker 1: [00:10:00] A popular one now is called survey by bear robotics. And for the cost of about a thousand dollars a month, it acts as a food runner taking plates from the kitchen to the dining room. Sometimes it's even mapped to go directly to the customer's table, but it saves human way from having to run back and forth to the kitchen as much, it can also be used to bust tables. So a waiter or waitress can put dirty dishes right back on the robot and send it into the kitchen. The Sevi robot is now at restaurants all [00:10:30] over the country. It's even being added to a number of Chili's restaurants. I could just hear the new jingle. I want my rule, but back ribs, I'm sure they'll work it out. The pandemic really boosted this whole movement of hiring robots, but I actually have met abot in food service years ago, back in 2014.
Speaker 1: And this robot is still shaking things up because it's a robot bartender that shakes things up. The maker shaker made a big splash when [00:11:00] it was added to a rural Caribbean cruise ship. When I got a demo, but maker shaker has expanded to venues around the world. And what was appealing as entertainment now really can help. When a bar is short staffed, there are so many robotics and food service that I didn't mention. Lots of machines that just do one job, some machines that no longer do the one job because the business changed. But these are just some examples of how the tech is being adopted today. And I wanna hear what type [00:11:30] of food service robotics you have come across. So do go in the comments and share your stories. And also, how do you feel about robots making of food? I know it can feel weird when we see robots taking human jobs, but it's not exactly a replacement robots have the perk of working in the kitchen around the clock and not getting sick unless you count maintenance downtime, of course, but it is still expensive and robots still need humans to be next to them, to fill in the gaps.
Speaker 1: [00:12:00] At least until robots get better with knives. Here's hoping they don't well, I'll keep covering the latest in robotics. So subscribe to the channel and I'll make sure to warn you when they start Matt, the blade. I want my, but rack back rib. Well, it takes a little practice.
