The Rise Of Robot Chefs

Robots have been making their way into kitchens nationwide as the technology becomes cheaper and finding workers becomes harder. Robot chefs offer restaurants a host of benefits. These robots could reduce viruses in food, improve and maintain cleanliness and hygiene.

Today, a number of tech firms are now developing robots that can cook and plate up entire meals, both for commercial and domestic kitchens. One of those at the forefront is London-based Moley Robotics, with its product, the Moley Robotic Kitchen. 

Attached to rails fitted to the ceiling, two robotic arms hang down over your oven and hob, and can cook more than 5,000 different recipes. You just pick the dish in question on a touch screen, add the ingredients it tells you to the built-in containers, and it does everything else. It can turn on the oven and hob, pick up and put down saucepans and spatulas, stir, whisk and flip. 

The developers of the Moley Robotic Kitchen first began by getting the robot to copy the movements of Chef Tim Anderson. Chef Tim explains how he would make dishes, and the robot would be programmed to copy his movement.

“I would cook through the recipe in a kitchen with a layout to that of the Moley kitchen, and my movements would be recorded, and then transferred onto the robotic hands and arms,” says Mr Anderson. Those movements would then be streamlined by the robotics team, and in the end, we wound up with a consistent program that would produce the same dish every time.”

One restaurant group that already uses a robot for all its cooking is French pizza mini-chain Pazzi. The business is owned by two robotic engineering students, who designed their own pizza-making robot. Once an order is received, the robot in each location completes the full process – pressing the dough, adding the sauce, putting on the chosen toppings, cooking the pizza, placing it in the takeaway box, slicing it into pieces, and handing it to the customer. This is said to take just five minutes per pizza.