Robotic Kitchen | Moley Robotics

The ‘Robotic Kitchen’ by Moley Robotics in collaboration with Shadow Robotics, Yachtline, DYSEGNO, Sebastian Conran and Stanford University Professor Mark Cutkosky, marks another step in the history of home automation.

“You just can’t differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.” – Isaac Asimov

The kitchen in question is equipped with a Robotic Chef who can cook you a perfect meal right out of your Grandma’s Recipes, or, something of your own design. Indeed, its work has been said to be that of a pre-programmed Master-Chef.

Not very far from the wizarding world of Harry Potter, where dishes do themselves, it is a sort of magical new solution to the time and desire dilemma of the century. Often we compromise on food on account of our busy schedules, the Robot Chef prototype helps the situation a lot.

It is a pair of hands complete with its own kitchen comprising a compact set of an oven, stove, fridge, dishwasher, small appliances and its touchscreen unit. The kitchen is operable using the touchscreen unit or an application developed for remote access from smartphones. Sliding glasses shield the kitchen and the work-space to ensure safety at all times. It has access to a world of recipes via means of a growing library.

Not only that, the conception by Moley Robotics opens up a whole new possibility that may in the future assist professionals and experimental creators to present or showcase their recipes in the form of a 3D presentation of the step-by-step method.

The product of twelve months of hard work, the project, which will come in a prefabricated set to be installed directly, is set to make its grand debut in 2017. The robot is fed the recipe by placing the 3D motion Captured recipe a human has prepared wearing cyber gloves, which then, it copies to the point. The testing has been done with the help of Tim Anderson, a former Master-chef winner, with positive results.

First unveiled at Consumer Electronics fair in Shanghai, it was a major success story, potential customers even had to be turned away in disappointment, as the commercial release would be later in 2017.

“We’re not making kitchens out of diamonds and covered in gold, we are focused on making a mass-market product.”- Mark Oleynik, Founder at Moley Robotics.

The Robot is expected to cost around $75,000 at its launch, what remains to be seen is if people opt for this functional extravagance or simply prefer a pizza, or, a sandwich on the go.

“Many people who watch the robot have an emotional reaction to it,” says Alina Isachenka, Moley’s operations manager. “It was really important to make sure it wasn’t scary. It would have been more cost-efficient to use a two or three-fingered gripper, but people may be scared by that – they don’t want a two-fingered robot in their kitchen, we also made sure that the robot works at the same speed as a human, not fast like industrial machines.”

The Robotic Hands have been known to pause and consider just like a human chef and completes a process at a humanely speed. It has no sensory adapters or special artificial intelligence, it is in-fact a friendly helper to your daily tasks. Instead of knives and choppers, the Robo-chef will use a food processor, for, Moley claims that the public would not react well to a knife-wielding set of robotic hands.

A kitchen that makes food and cleans up after itself, seems like a dream come true. Oleynik says it is, “not replacing people, it replaces boring operations.” Oleynik also believes that the project would, in the soon-to-come future, be a platform for healthy competition between cooks who can upload their material onto its library.

Moley sees Restaurants as potential market for the Robotic Kitchen, but is not focusing on that at the moment. Just imagining the plausibility of the variety of ways it can be useful to us gives an anticipatory vigor to the mind. Although the Robot lacks in the more intuitive nature of chefs, it has a bright future in homes, especially the more conventional ones.

By : Antara Jha