Unfortunately, doing stuff while being subjected to random accelerating forces makes many people feel nauseous, and physical tasks become more difficult.
why? in what world are you so busy that you dont have "enough time" to go to your home, take time to unwind, clean up after a day's work, cook a meal for you and your family and enjoy a family dinner/lunch/breakfast?"
replace cooking with laundry/cleaning/bathing/repairing/small fixes around the home?
is life REALLY SO FAST AND TOUGH that you have to do multi-tasking basic human social/personal proceses?
If this were true, restaurants would already have these robots.
Also, I'm talking about real cooking, not some mechanized approximation that produces meals akin to fast food, or the microwave stuff you can already buy in the supermarket.
As a robotics engineer I don’t think it’s true that “if it were a robotics problem it would be solved.” Robotics for non industrial uses are basically in their infancy.
Also I am of the opinion that the best way to make a meal is a purpose built series of small machines to perform different tasks. So you have an onion preparation machine which peels and cores the onions and maybe also performs onion-specific slicing. You have a vegetable washing machine to wash potatoes and carrots and zucchini etc. You have various cutting chambers that feed in to various cooking systems.
Doing all of this is possible today and I don’t believe it has to be limited to the low quality food you mention. But developing all of these specialized systems is extremely expensive. I actually really hope to work on all of this stuff as a massive open source project once my open source farming robot project gains enough traction. I literally obsess over this problem.
Otherwise you could imagine something like a pair of robot arms and a vision system on a track in a normal kitchen, but again robotics really hasn’t been able to produce functional or affordable human like hands, and the software to handle them is also in its infancy (that part is an “AI problem” though.
Anyway robotics is extremely expensive and low minimum wages means it’s cheaper to abuse migrant workers in the kitchen than pay for all the R&D necessary to really solve these problems.
But my hope is that an open source project could get the ball rolling and then the costs required to finish everything could be spread among many different groups once the basic concept is proven.
They can stack vertically such that they take up less space than a commercial kitchen, which cannot stack vertically (at least not on the scale of multiple separate operations in one vertical meter) and requires space for humans to move around. An onion prepping machine might be 30cm x 30cm x 100cm. You could fit 11 mechanisms of that size in one cubic meter.
My view on cleaning is that the systems must be automatically self cleaning. Otherwise yes cleaning would be a pain.
Interesting . I agree that arms and hands are probably not necessary and that custom tools are better suited. One think that came to mind when you mentioned many chambers and cooking systems; these must be easy to clean to avoid food waste getting stuck.
Oh absolutely. My view is that integrated automatic cleaning must be part of the system design. Such a system would be a huge pain if it was not self cleaning.
It was called buzz robotics and had a couple posts make it to the front page here. Even got a YC interview.
I haven’t gotten around to writing a post mortem but I’ll just say - it’s a very hard problem to solve given the dexterity and safety requirements.
Maybe one day.