Of course, this won't be how food is prepared by robots ultimately. Each step will more likely be performed by small robots optimized for the task.
Food will also probably be driven from place to place by robotic vehicles. You might have one company making noodles and sending them to other companies five minutes away that incorporate them into a dish or other product.
Virtual supply chains will eliminate a lot of capital cost of setting up a restaurant and reduce the delays that destroy freshness and necessitate preservatives. Like fabless semiconductor companies, there might be prepless restaurants.
Another company may just do all the selection and slicing of your vegetables for you. They may be picked overnight at their peak and delivered to you so you can throw them in your omelet. The slicing might even happen on the trip to you.
I can see you selecting a recipe and a web app that prices and source all the ingredients for you. If you love to cook but don't enjoy finding or prepping some or all of the ingredients, such arrangements could help you save money and get better results.
Quite a few people eat the cheapest and most convenient foods they can find. But in the future, healthy food will be cheaper, fresher and will find you, hopefully making crap truly uncompetitive.
Your assuming a vary high density food distribution network. Most restaurants in the US are in fairly low density areas. So while food is often prepared offsite, the shipping delays result in preservation issues.
I don't understand how a more eficient chain of supply and preparation will make healthier food cheaper. I was under the impression that generally lower quality goods are cheaper then higher quality ones, which in the case of food means healthier food. Could you explain your reasoning?
I wonder, how long until we get the first completely automated fast food restaurant?
You walk in and download the menu over the wifi, pick what you want and pay with your card. You are then issued with a long unique code.
A machine prepares your meal and your phone prompts you to approach one of the vending areas. You then enter the code or scan an image and your food appears through a hole.
How many employees would be needed for serving > 100 per hour?
It's going to take about 40-50 years to reproduce what humans can do in a restaurant today with robots. More likely, the food preparation process will be altered to allow for easier automation. With the exception of a supervisor/engineer (that position won't be automated for at least another 100 years) - I think we'll see a fully automated fast food restaurant in about 20-25 years - though some elements of the restaurant business (Cleaning, French Fries, Order taking) - will likely be automated sooner - there will be demonstration restaurants with 50% automation in about 10 years.
[note: And yes, I do realize that the above predictions will require radical advancements in automation that are not easy to predict - call me an optimist. :-) ]
I visit those Pizza Hut express stores and watch them make my pizza all the time. I don't see anything they do that couldn't be done by a fairly complex vending machine....
I think there is a somewhat unstoppable direction towards automation but it will probably be shaky and filled with potholes.
For example, its been interesting to see the consumer response to the self checkout stands in the big chain stores. Those self-checkout stations in their current form I would say are somewhat of a failure to encourage automation at least from a consumer's standpoint. I'm a techie and I actively avoid them. Why? I and the other people I'm waiting in line behind take forever because we are all slow in finding the bar codes on each product. Not only that, 1 out of 10 times something seemingly goes wrong with checking out a product - the product needs to be verified by a store manager, the product gets scanned twice, etc. which all usually end up taking longer than the regular checkout lines. Interestingly a few of the stores near me just recently removed their automated systems after having them for many years. (I'm actually hoping one day they slap RFIDs on everything and you can just push your basket through a scanner.)
But I think the risk with robots and automated systems is when things go wrong when interacting with an unpredictable human. Technically when things go wrong its usually user error but not through the consumer's eyes - to them its a stupid robot that keeps on throwing their sandwich on the ground and their response is usually to run back to the old reliable way.
I think that's really an implementation issue, rather then a problem with the idea. The current batch of self-checkout systems are very very fragile. It seems that instead of optimizing them for throughput/efficiency, they optimized them for detecting if you are trying to steal something. For example, something as simple as brushing the weight sensor will trigger an alert that takes 15-20s to go away. There's really no reason to do that unless you are worried about people stealing. In reality, checking the weight is a very poor way of detecting this (every system I've seen has an "I'm using my own bag" option that makes the alert go away.
These are actually very unoptimized from the UI point of view too. For example, most of the people have their own loyalty card they scan at the beginning. Why not track these, and adjust settings on the machine based on it? For example, I mute the volume whenever I start, that would be nice to keep track of. Defaulting to showing me a list food that I've purchased over my last few trips would make things go quicker instead of me having to dig through pages of items looking for common things.
I'm rather interested in the amazing amount of abstraction achieved between "get instructions from internet" and "grab this pot and do shit with it". Fantastic.
That said, when the bread didn't go in the toaster for a second time I was half hoping it would start beating it until the toaster was a pile of screwed up metal.
Willowgarage are also the guys behind the Point Cloud Library, an awesome computer vision library for processing point clouds (e.g. what the Kinect produces):
I'd say that any command that can make something physical happen in the real world has a whole different set of security concerns than we've faced before. So its a serious concern.
[+] [-] stretchwithme|14 years ago|reply
Of course, this won't be how food is prepared by robots ultimately. Each step will more likely be performed by small robots optimized for the task.
Food will also probably be driven from place to place by robotic vehicles. You might have one company making noodles and sending them to other companies five minutes away that incorporate them into a dish or other product.
Virtual supply chains will eliminate a lot of capital cost of setting up a restaurant and reduce the delays that destroy freshness and necessitate preservatives. Like fabless semiconductor companies, there might be prepless restaurants.
Another company may just do all the selection and slicing of your vegetables for you. They may be picked overnight at their peak and delivered to you so you can throw them in your omelet. The slicing might even happen on the trip to you.
I can see you selecting a recipe and a web app that prices and source all the ingredients for you. If you love to cook but don't enjoy finding or prepping some or all of the ingredients, such arrangements could help you save money and get better results.
Quite a few people eat the cheapest and most convenient foods they can find. But in the future, healthy food will be cheaper, fresher and will find you, hopefully making crap truly uncompetitive.
[+] [-] onemoreact|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vasco|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggy2011|14 years ago|reply
You walk in and download the menu over the wifi, pick what you want and pay with your card. You are then issued with a long unique code.
A machine prepares your meal and your phone prompts you to approach one of the vending areas. You then enter the code or scan an image and your food appears through a hole.
How many employees would be needed for serving > 100 per hour?
[+] [-] pwim|14 years ago|reply
http://www.onlyinjapan.org/2010/10/20/fuamen-the-new-japanes...
[+] [-] ghshephard|14 years ago|reply
[note: And yes, I do realize that the above predictions will require radical advancements in automation that are not easy to predict - call me an optimist. :-) ]
[+] [-] celias|14 years ago|reply
Penny: Really? They’re going to make a robot that spits on your hamburger?
[+] [-] Natsu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] moocow01|14 years ago|reply
For example, its been interesting to see the consumer response to the self checkout stands in the big chain stores. Those self-checkout stations in their current form I would say are somewhat of a failure to encourage automation at least from a consumer's standpoint. I'm a techie and I actively avoid them. Why? I and the other people I'm waiting in line behind take forever because we are all slow in finding the bar codes on each product. Not only that, 1 out of 10 times something seemingly goes wrong with checking out a product - the product needs to be verified by a store manager, the product gets scanned twice, etc. which all usually end up taking longer than the regular checkout lines. Interestingly a few of the stores near me just recently removed their automated systems after having them for many years. (I'm actually hoping one day they slap RFIDs on everything and you can just push your basket through a scanner.)
But I think the risk with robots and automated systems is when things go wrong when interacting with an unpredictable human. Technically when things go wrong its usually user error but not through the consumer's eyes - to them its a stupid robot that keeps on throwing their sandwich on the ground and their response is usually to run back to the old reliable way.
[+] [-] devicenull|14 years ago|reply
These are actually very unoptimized from the UI point of view too. For example, most of the people have their own loyalty card they scan at the beginning. Why not track these, and adjust settings on the machine based on it? For example, I mute the volume whenever I start, that would be nice to keep track of. Defaulting to showing me a list food that I've purchased over my last few trips would make things go quicker instead of me having to dig through pages of items looking for common things.
[+] [-] antihero|14 years ago|reply
That said, when the bread didn't go in the toaster for a second time I was half hoping it would start beating it until the toaster was a pile of screwed up metal.
[+] [-] trb|14 years ago|reply
http://www.pointclouds.org/about.html
The Kinect Fusion implementation by Anatoly Baksheev in their trunk is very impressive:
http://www.pointclouds.org/news/kinectfusion-open-source.htm...
If anyone has a Kinect and Ubuntu and wants to try it, I've compiled an unpolished tutorial on how to do that:
http://hobonaut.com/
[+] [-] beilabs|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kellysutton|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hristov|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noonespecial|14 years ago|reply
But on the off chance that anyone missed the inside joke: http://xkcd.com/149/
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Ideka|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atallcostsky|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickpp|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sown|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|14 years ago|reply