Understanding and Dispensing Ingredients for Smart Robotic Cooking

Problem Description

A key challenge for restaurants, cafeterias, and cloud kitchens today is in meeting the expected delivery times of a large volume and variety of orders, and in maintaining consistency of taste and quantity. Owing to the ongoing problem of labor shortage, many of these places operate in reduced hours. With Covid on the rise, there is also an increasing need for food delivery services, and this demand cannot be met with the current levels of labor shortage.

Proposal

To combat this issue, we believe that the ideal solution is to automate the repetitive, non-creative tasks of cooking food, using a robot that can mimic the dispensing mechanism of a human arm. This solution would easily fit in at any restaurant, cafeteria, or cloud kitchen enterprise, and provide a fast, efficient and adaptive system that can operate 24/7 and counter the issue of labor shortage. Our solution consists of a 6 DOF manipulator that operates in a semi-constrained kitchen space and can recognize and manipulate standard transparent containers to dispense any necessary ingredient. The proposed system takes in a recipe from the user and dispenses the requested quantities of the ingredients into a cooking pot in minimal time. The system also has the necessary intelligence to verify if the right ingredient and the required quantity is available in the containers before beginning the dispensing step. It shall also be able to handle a variety of ingredients in different physical states like liquids, powders, and chopped vegetables.

Use Case

To understand the working of the Ratatouille Robot from a user’s perspective, let us look at the story of Rick. Rick is a chef, baker, and entrepreneur living in New York City. He is very passionate about cooking and food. He realizes that in a bustling city like NYC, people would enjoy having healthy, delicious food delivered to their doorstep. Renting restaurant spaces in NYC is extremely expensive and Rick is exploring the idea of cloud kitchens so that he can set up a kitchen in his own house or in a small space and start delivering his delicious food to people.

Rick sets up a modular kitchen space and scours for people to assist him with cooking, but the lack of labor in NYC leaves him short-handed. He struggles to deliver orders in time by himself and gets tired of repetitive, non-creative tasks in the kitchen.

Rick then comes across “Ratatouille Robotics”, which makes ingredient handling and dispensing robots for smart cooking. Ratatouille seemed tailor-made for his problem, and he deploys the robot in his kitchen. The Ratatouille robot operates in a semi-constrained, structured environment where the ingredient containers are placed at predefined positions in a rack. Now, all Rick has to do is refill his ingredient containers periodically, and input his meticulously crafted recipes. And voila, with the press of a button, the robot takes over his kitchen.

Figure 1: Robot Arm picking up a container from the shelf

Rick first tries out his signature salad. He enters the recipe which includes a variety of ingredients like olive oil, a variety of sauces, onions, tomatoes, broccoli, mushrooms, olives, capsicum, oregano, chili flakes, salt, sugar, and vinegar. Ratatouille effortlessly and accurately pours liquids (oil), semi-liquids (sauce), rigid solids (broccoli, onions), and deformable solids (tomatoes, mushrooms). Even for powdered ingredients (salt, sugar, oregano, and chilli flakes), Ratatouille is able to perform shaking motions using specialized containers to get the quantities exactly right. All of this is done in under 10 minutes.

Figure 2: Robot Arm dispensing the ingredients into a cooking pot placed on top of a weighing scale

Rick finds Ratatouille extremely convenient and fast. Ratatouille is able to operate with speed while dispensing accurate quantities of ingredients within a tolerance of 5g. As a result, his business quickly picks up due to his fast deliveries with no compromise in taste and quality. He also finds it easy to use, with a hassle-free set-up and an intuitive interface to key in ingredients and quantities. The robot is low-maintenance with minimal downtime and ensures minimal wastage of food. Rick feels like he has hit the jackpot in the cloud-kitchen space with Ratatouille, and he cannot wait to expand his business with more of these amazing robots!

Figure 3: Happy Rick!