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Spyce Kitchen, a robotic chef built by four recent M.I.T. grads
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoI've been predicting robotic fast food for a decade now. And it's here! By cooking with no human hand ever coming into contact with the ingredients or utensils, clearly a health benefit is accrued. And by steam-cleaning the cooker periodically, quality is improved. I'd envisioned a somewhat different robot. I thought the ingredients could be tube-delivered like caulking guns, on a rotating 'tool carousel' so you could cook different recipes by selecting and timing. And process vertically so you avoid most 'conveyor belt' issues. Finally do it as drive-thru with automated ordering (touch screen/phone app) to eliminate the rest of the human factor. The result should be good quality, fast food at a radically cheaper price.
- tantalor 8y ago> no human hand... clearly a health benefit That is a non sequitur. The most dangerous illness associated with fast food (poor nutrition aside) such as E. coli[1] and Hep A[2] are most readily attributed to ingredient suppliers, not improper food handling. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/ecoli/2015/o26-11-15/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/ecoli/2015/o26-11-15/index.html [2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoAnd who handles the ingredients improperly? Doesn't refrigerate them sufficiently? Uses expired ingredients? Fallible humans. Lets remove them from the equation.
- onion2k 8y agoA robot chef is programmed by a human, so the human element has not been removed.
- nothrabannosir 8y agoIt has been reduced from O(n) to O(1), so much easier to check.
- horsecaptin 8y agoDoesn't chew enough? Doesn't wash their hands before eating? Eats too much? There's more to the equation! Robots feeding robots built by robots and programmed by robots! A clean solution for a clean planet earth!
- greedo 8y agoRobotic slaughterhouses would still have problem keeping fecal matter out of meat. The best way of preventing most food illnesses is radiating the food, but our irrational society won't go for that.
- bpicolo 8y agoIrradiation does have issues of it's own, like making things taste funky [0] [0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0309174008002337 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03091...
- pbalau 8y agoTrue, but with a full automatic system to convert those ingredients to food, you could add a test step, where you filter out the contaminated ingredients.
- knieveltech 8y agoI feel like waiting for the labs to come back on e coli and salmonella tests might inversely impact wait times.
- dd36 8y agoI was assuming he meant something like the flu. Fast food workers have awful benefits and low pay thus working while sick.
- gnode 8y agoThat doesn't mean that labour aren't a more frequent source of food-borne illnesses, just not the most serious cases. I'm not likely to die from someone sneezing in my food, but I don't want to catch what they have nonetheless.
- opencl 8y agoAll this does is dump the ingredients in a pot and mix them by spinning the pot. It's a hell of a long way off from making such advanced recipes as sandwiches or burritos. And at $7.50 it's rather expensive by fast food standards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc8D-CnDMiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc8D-CnDMiE
- chillingeffect 8y agoI am personally very interested in developing a robot that is able to wield a knife and slice food, particularly healthy vegetables. Here's a compilation video of various food robots from July 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRngacYpi7E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRngacYpi7E
- Robotbeat 8y agoHere's a robot that is able to wield two knives and "slice" vegetables: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBSEGqaK79M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBSEGqaK79M
- joezydeco 8y agoIf you think labor is what keeps fast food prices high, you are mistaken. Most of the largest chains have pretty much automated nearly everything by now that's possible given reliability and safety standards. If you look in the kitchen of any McDonald's nobody is cooking or preparing the components. They're either pre-cut, loaded into dispensers, being cooked in a self-timing temperature-controlled fryer, or being cooked on a self-timing temperature-controlled clamshell grill. If you check out a Taco Bell, they've even eliminated the cooking part. It's all made off-site in large batches and rewarmed on the assembly line. Even the beloved Chipotle has moved to retherming their components where possible. The human labor is merely in assembly and delivery. And automating that with robots is a generation away, if at all.
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoRead the article! Its all about automating assembly and delivery.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago25% to 40% I see by labor statistics. That's quite a margin.
- Retric 8y agoFood prep is a small portion of that, you also pay people to clean the bathrooms, take orders, handle inventory and disputes, etc. Food prep on it's own is almost a rounding error. You might be getting 30 seconds of time from people making minimum wage for a combo, but that's about it and even at 15$/hour that's well under 15 cents per order.
- petra 8y agoSo that's around 1% of revenue? For a low margin business like restaurants that's probably worth it.
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoIn other words, humans are just disposable, self-healing robots that require minimal maintenance. And when they can no longer do the job, Right-to-Work laws summarily get rid of them.
- cgriswald 8y agoAny price change will not be radical. Wages account for about 25% of the cost of fast food, but these robots are not free and any savings will result in price drops only if the price change also increases profits. Instead, more money may be spent on better ingredients or marketing. Do not expect a 25% price drop. With regard to health and safety, the robots will provide only small benefit. Humans are better equipped (i.e., we have noses) to detect bad food; and in any case humans will still be involved in the handling, storage, and transportation of ingredients. Although disgusting, cases where the cook doesn't clean the grill properly and people get sick are much rarer than cases where the ingredients are already bad. I suspect the main benefit of these robots to a fast food chain would be consistency in product and preparation times.
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoThe market will produce those that work savings into the price. We can't make blanket statements denying that? The automated food industry is very, very good at producing quality safe food. And I reject that humans will still be storing nor handling food - a truck backs up, exchanges pallets with a food container carousel, the truck drives away with the empties. Robots all the way!
- cgriswald 8y agoYou can imagine the future however you like; however, as you chided a sibling poster, "read the article." The technology on offer does not do those things. But yes, I think you can make a blanket statement that decisions will be made on the margins and any savings to the consumer will be incidental.
- peteretep 8y agoHow on earth is there not a photo to go with this?
- tantalor 8y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc8D-CnDMiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc8D-CnDMiE
- spycefoodco 8y agoThat's an old video. Our new robotic kitchen has been completely redesigned and reengineered since then. There's a photo in the social share...check out @spycefoodco on Facebook or Twitter to see the image.
- tantalor 8y agoIs it so hard to give us a link to the video?
- onion2k 8y agoThere's a video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc8D-CnDMiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc8D-CnDMiE
- sorenn111 8y agoI'm surprised Moley (http://www.moley.com/ http://www.moley.com/) didn't get a mention. I'm super excited about robotic food preparation, especially in the case of consumer facing robotics where its a unit in your own kitchen. With that said, from the robotics progress I've seen/studied, more fundamental robotics progress needs to be made first. The approaches used right now are just not durable/reliable enough for mass market adoption. Best of luck to that team though.
- bpicolo 8y agoMoley looks like a science fiction pipe dream right now and would require an absolutely massive number of leaps in modern robotics - control, vision, whatever. We're a long way off such a system. Putting junk in a bowl is a much simpler feat. Also hard for robotics to win much on I should think because the labor for putting food into a bowl is not terribly expensive as is (and imo not a particularly exciting market) - see Eatsa. Though it's still cool that they end-to-end the process with dishwashing (according to video).
- gnode 8y agoThis seems convoluted to me. Like using an android to operate a manual spinning wheel, instead of an automated spinning machine.
- michaelmcmillan 8y agoJust throwing out some armchair criticism: I would think that a robotic chef would look a little less intuitive. I mean, is two monkey arms really the optimal strategy for revolutionizing this field? Happy to be proven wrong!
- lnsru 8y agoThe price of $15k according their YouTube video is ridiculously low. Decent robot arm costs you $5k alone. Not sure how they will plan to make some profit even buying parts in bulk.
- leoedin 8y ago$5k is on the low end. The demo kitchen they did was with 2 UR5 robots, list price somewhere around $20k each. They put 2 5 finger hands on the end, which probably cost at least the same again each. I'd bet you'd be getting well towards $75k (or maybe even significantly more) just buying the components.
- Symmetry 8y agoNice to see them getting coverage, we were at the same startup incubator (Greentown) before we both moved on to larger offices. I can attest that the food this machine makes is, in fact, tasty.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jpm_sd 8y agoThe description in the article suggests that the machine does not actually make any of the food, it just measures and dispenses pre-cooked items into a bowl? So it's a glorified automatic dog feeder?
- VectorLock 8y agoAccording to the article it rolls them around in some kind of barrel shaped apparatus to "cook" the food. That might be what the 'custom forged woks' are?
- Symmetry 8y agoNo, the machine actually does do the cooking. There's an induction based heater that also mixes the food. Different sorts of raw vegetables are added by a hopper in a sequence that depends on their cooking time. Finally the mixer/cooker dispenses the meal into a bowl.
- shozab 8y agoGood Sir I like It
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bhouston 8y agoPeople seem to forget that nearly all frozen meals and frozen pizzas are all robotic made by the many millions per day. Just by very expensive, large and high speed robots. The innovation is now trying to make robots that are more flexible, smaller and low volume food production while not being super expensive.
- wiremine 8y agoI'm also aware of robots being used in fast food pizza preparation. In some markets the robots are what keep the franchisees profitable.
- sharemywin 8y agoAre you talking about at the distribution centers?
- wiremine 8y agoNo, I'm talking about the end franchisees that makes and bakes the pizzas for the consumer.
- oh_sigh 8y agoWhich ones specifically? At Dominos, I see people hand tossing dough and setting the ingredients whenever I go into one(not too frequently, don't judge me). I would imagine a group like Dominos would be the first to mechanize considering their scale?
- jjallen 8y agoWow, really wanted a picture in this article. Will have to read it later to learn what it looks like.
- phnofive 8y agoBetter yet if you can spare the time, a 90s video: https://youtu.be/3kx2d27AqKg https://youtu.be/3kx2d27AqKg An photo of the updated device in background that appears it should have run in the New Yorker article: https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5ac80c69ae933e116601abbf/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/Talk-Cheshes-Facebook.jpg https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5ac80c69ae933e116601abbf/...
- spycefoodco 8y agoThere's a picture in the social share. Check out @spycefoodco on Facebook or Twitter to see!
- TheAceOfHearts 8y agoWhy not just link to the picture instead of pandering your social media accounts?
- ohquu 8y agoI went to their Twitter and looked for the picture. I assume this is it. I don't see anything else: https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/983333636975054848/siPS_w5d?format=jpg&name=600x314 https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/983333636975054848/siPS_w5d?f...
- Jose2765 8y agohack all
- syntaxing 8y agoHere's a post from two years ago that has a video and some photos[1]. Not sure what warranted a new article from the New Yorker (maybe a product release?). [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/mit-students-invented-a-robotic-kitchen-2016-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/mit-students-invented-a-robot...
- maxxxxx 8y agoI find it interesting how good the top schools are at making sure they get credit for things. I often read "Harvard scientist..., MIT grads, Stanford..." in headlines. You rarely read "University of Minnesota" (just a made up example) so the casual reader may think that Harvard, MIT and Stanford are the only schools that do interesting things. And it really works. At a startup I worked at we had a guy from MIT and whenever the VCs talked to to the low ranks they inevitable ended up talking to him. And no, he was not the best engineer. Not even close.
- coupdejarnac 8y agoIt's name dropping, appealing to people who are easily impressed.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoThis. Regardless of the school name you prefix it with "graduates designed" conjures up mental imagery of bolted assemblies with fasteners you can't actually get a wrench on and massive stamped parts with a size tolerance of whatever the default in their cad software was"
- Animats 8y agoIt's just another automatic wok. There are many companies making those in China.[1][2][3][4] And those are just the pan style. The simpler rotating-drum machines are easily available on Alibaba.[5] Those guys didn't do their homework to see what's available. The home-sized ones often take a cartridge of little plastic bins preloaded with the ingredients and coded with the instructions. Just slip one of those in the slot, push start, and get a good hot meal. You want to compete with China, you need to know what's already been done there. Remember those "Bodega" clowns? They apparently didn't know that much more advanced automatic convenience stores already exist in China. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HkGRzzsKH4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HkGRzzsKH4 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCTv-4sFt_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCTv-4sFt_s [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NTIciISVPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NTIciISVPA [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S--wwu4S-w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S--wwu4S-w [5] https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/automatic-wok-machine.html https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/automatic-wok-machine.html
- kough 8y agoWell, no, it's not just an automatic wok - there's a consumer experience around an automatic wok. Integrating everything so that there's no human involved whatsoever is a bit more difficult than ordering an automatic wok from Alibaba. If you're trying to serve freshy-cooked meals from a vending machine, there is so much more going on than just the heating elements. Just to pick one: the supply chain is a real issue. Getting fresh ingredients into the machines, keeping them running, performing maintenance... all of that requires a well-tuned supply chain, knowledge of food sources, etc., especially since Spyce is targeting an upscale "fast-casual" (~healthy) demographic. As a disclaimer I was pitched by this team in 2015-2016, and was pretty convinced that they weren't facing much local competition.
- opencl 8y agoSo they have to buy an automatic wok on alibaba, and then do the exact same things every other fast-casual restaurant already does?
- dwighttk 8y ago>conceived as an engineering solution to every hungry college student’s gripe—where to get good, cheap food fast. (It’s the same market that the meal-replacement drink Soylent is after.) Pretty broad definition of "good" if Soylent fits in there.