Category: Behind the Bot
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A dentist came to career day at my school when I was a kid, and other than chewing on those colored tablets that highlighted plaque on our teeth, the thing I remember most was him saying that a dentist’s main job was to put themselves out of business. By that he meant, he wanted to…
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Earlier this year, Chinese company JD.com said that it planned on opening 1,000 robot-staffed restaurants across China by the year 2020. Well, now it has just 999 more to go as this past weekend, JD.com opened up the XCafe robot restaurant in Tianjin. Pandaily reports that the new robo-restaurant is 400 square meters and seats…
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There’s been a lot of talk lately about how robots will change the world of restaurants, and it’s no wonder; with everything from fully robotic restaurants to food robot unicorns, it’s easy to imagine that it won’t be long before the machines take over. While much of the conversation is about the impact of robots…
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This week, I had a chance to visit wine country to check out what the world of fine dining is thinking about things like food robots. I was down in Napa Valley at the reThink Food conference, where I spent three days talking to chefs, restaurateurs and food execs about how tech will change the culinary world. Near the…
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Earlier this year, consumer electronics giant Sony announced a collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University to research robots for “optimizing food preparation, cooking and delivery.” This week, we got a sense of how those robots might look via a new Sony promo video. Titled “AI x Robotics x Cooking,” the video shows off two scenarios. The…
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In a move to further enhance its delivery strategy, Pizza Hut unveiled a “mobile pizza factory” this week that could potentially be as cool as the name makes it sound. Dubbed the Tundra PIE Pro, the pizza-making truck, which Pizza Hut created with Toyota, made its first public appearance at Toyota’s 2018 Specialty Equipment Market…
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Starship announced today that it’s four-wheeled robots now autonomously deliver packages to people at their home and work, in a move that pushes the company beyond food delivery and more into everyday use. The new service makes Starship something of a middleman in the delivery process. Users download the Starship app and when ordering something…
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Haidilao, which operates a hotpot restaurant chain, has partnered with Panasonic to open up a robot-run kitchen in Beijing on October 28. The new automated kitchen will reportedly be used to help Haidilao expand to up to 5,000 locations around the world. According to Bloomberg, the new Haidilao location will feature robots that “will take…
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If you live in the Westwood area of Los Angeles, you can see sunshine, the occasional movie star, and now delivery robots shuttling food to hungry local denizens. According to the Daily Bruin, Kiwi Campus started rolling out its delivery robots at the beginning of this month. Westwood is home to UCLA, so this particular…
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The Dallas city council agreed this week to a six-month pilot program that will put delivery robots on its city streets. San Francisco-based Marble will provide up to 20 of its squat, cooler-like, four-wheeled robots to cruise Dallas city sidewalks at about 5 miles per hour to make door-to-door deliveries of things like restaurant meals,…
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At the Smart Kitchen Summit this week, panelists talking to The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht had a lot of different thoughts on the role of robots in the food industry. They even had different definitions. To Rishi Israni, founder of Zimplistic, robots are “electromechanical devices that [do] a series of complex steps.” To Cynthia Yeung, COO…
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When a problem needs to be solved at scale, we usually turn to tech. And right now, there’s a big, big problem looming: the world’s population is about 7.5 billion people and counting, and we need to find more efficient ways to feed them. Inventor Pablos Holman is betting on 3D-printed food as the solution…
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