Right now it seems like its “A.I.”. Still big now are the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Recently we had COVID 19.
What’s next?
Right now it seems like its “A.I.”. Still big now are the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Recently we had COVID 19.
What’s next?
We can’t be far off people realizing how good robotic chef arms are and someone like Samsung making one that we start seeing in midsized kitchens, after this home adoption will be rapid and have huge benefits for diet and cost of living as well as being far more environmentally friendly than preprapared food.
It’ll probably use a trained Llama model (metas ai which is good at tasking) to translate requests and input data to a cooking model likely based on the one they always use for trackmania but I forget it’s name I think it’s Nvidias evolutionary one - it simulates the actions to evolve a solution before actuting motors - its impressively quick now even on a small processor and used in loads of stuff. The robotics is easy just a couple of continuous rotational servos and grasping mechanisms which are super common now.
I don’t know if any of the currently existing ones will get the market spot, I expect like with mp3 players It’ll come down to a big name making an easy to use but feature limited version to capture the market.
If anyone has questions happy to defend my assertion.
I have questions. Is this something in use today? Who is manufacturing them? Is this something you’re personally familiar with or just aware of?
I haven’t seen specifically cooking, but there have been quite a few papers about mixing task-instruction LLMs with task-execution robot arms (like they use in manufacturing) to perform simple tasks given only a plain English instruction. Eg, “pick up the red ball and place it in the blue bowl”. Very cool research but still very new.
Yeah go on the YouTube rabbit hole of ‘cooking robot’ there are some really impressive ones - overpriced and not entirely practical but really good.
All the actual sensor and control stuff is used in industrial and factory kitchens but built into linear assembly lines so putting that into a more multiuse tool is the challenge.
I’m not personally familiar, just follow automation and robotics these are something I’ve been interested in for a while. It’s a prefect task for where automation and ai is at the moment.
How reliable are they, especially in edge cases? The word on the street has been that they’re still super dumb and we’re not automating blue-collar jobs like “chef” any time soon.
Factory robots are incredibly graceful now and sensor systems are great at combining information into models, I would say that they’re almost certainly able to act safely - they’re not going to stab anyone by mistake, but might occasionally call for help locating a carrot or odd things until those small bugs are ironed out.
I think fully multitasking robots are a way off because like self-drive there’s just so much complexity caused by small differences that accounting for it is endless, but an arm on a cooker with a prep area beside it would be restrained enough that solving the individual design issues would be manageable.
I should say I’m not imagining it to be as good as the advert, the first ones will have fairly basic ingredients and dishes they support - probably a few thousand but missing various key dishes that are a bit too awkward. I’m Also imagining it’ll cook better than me but not upto my mums best.
So I don’t think they’ll replace chef but we’re about to see a slew of task focused devices, probably in construction and similar fields. The chef focusing on the more creative and skilled elements while using them to chop, stir, make sauces or icing or whatever.
Oh, an arm on a cooker and prep area isn’t quite what I thought you were talking about. A human employee would still have to be around to feed it ingredients, clean it, and deliver the food, then, so that’s more like an increment on top of the slicing machines and automatic ovens fast food joints already have.
They’ll probably call it something more impressive sounding and oversell it but it will be kinda revolutionary.
When the trend of robots cooking from raw starts taking over the prepackaged and oven ready meals we’ll see real competition and innovation
Yep! Sorry, didn’t mean to diminish it. That’s still a good answer to “the next big thing”.