Category: Robotics, AI & Data
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Last month, after 29 months straight of job gains, the number of total available restaurant jobs dropped. It wasn’t a huge dip – 800 jobs – but compared to the previous month’s gain of 24 thousand and monthly gains as high as 81 thousand at the beginning of the year, the dip was somewhat surprising,…
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This week, a group of researchers from MIT and NVIDIA are showing off a system that one day may be pivotal in helping our robot chef make dinner without making a mistake. While robotic planning systems are good at developing high-level plans, they often fail when confronted with highly-complex environments. Because of this, the group…
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Last fall, a group of researchers at Cal Poly was awarded a $700 thousand grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the social and ethical impacts of AI and cooking automation. The study will last four years and explore the benefits and risks to individuals and the impact on family and communal relationships,…
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More bad news on the food robot front. Karakuri, a startup that made a robotic food kiosk that assembles various cold and hot ingredients into prepared meals, is shutting down, according to founder Barney Wragg. In a post on Linkedin, Wragg cited the pandemic and the challenging fundraising environment as the reason for the news…
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When Andrew Simmons decided to buy a restaurant in January 2020, little did the long-time entrepreneur know that in just a few months, he would be forced to close his doors due to COVID. But instead of giving up, he knew he had to get creative to survive. Survive he did, and when he reopened…
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Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman told investors this week at William Blair’s Growth Stock conference that the company plans to have its Infinite Kitchen robotic makeline installed at all new locations within a five-year timeframe. The proclamation marks the first time the fast-casual salad chain has indicated they plan to deploy automation across all of its…
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Last month, the NY Post revealed that Chipotle founder Steve Ells is plotting a comeback with an automation-heavy restaurant concept called Kernel. According to the Post, who viewed the startup’s pitch deck, Ells plans to build a chain of restaurants that makes the food centrally in a ghost kitchen and finishes the food in small-footprint…
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Late last week, news broke that Zume, the company famous mostly for raising a whole bunch of money for its pizza robot & cook-on-the-road food trucks concept, had shut down. The company’s demise, first reported by The Information, comes after burning through $450 million and a well-documented pivot away from its pizza robot and delivery…
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Uber Technologies Inc. is gearing up for a robotic future, bolstering its partnership with Serve Robotics Inc., a maker of sidewalk delivery robots. Following a successful trial in Los Angeles, the companies announced they would deploy up to 2,000 of Serve’s delivery robots in multiple markets across the United States. The deal marks one of…
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Attention all baby-faced twenty-somethings who regularly get carded buying drinks: You may soon face a new high-tech twist on the age-old right of passage in the form of palm-scanning. At least, that’s if Amazon has its way. According to the company, they’ve just added age verification to their Amazon One palm bio-authentication platform. According to…
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Today, Wendy’s announced they will trial an underground delivery system later this year in partnership with Pipedream Labs. According to the announcement, the system will deliver orders to customers via a carside pick-up portal using “autonomous robots” that traverse an underground pipe system. Spoon readers might remember Pipedream Labs as the company with big plans…
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Last week, Sweetgreen opened the company’s first robotic restaurant in Naperville, Ill, a suburb of Chicago. The new automated restaurant, which the company calls Infinite Kitchen, comes almost two years after the company acquired Spyce Kitchen, a startup building automated robotic makelines. The Infinite Kitchen name is not new; Spyce first used the name when…
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