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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food robots

Connected Robotics Raises ¥850M to Expand its Food Robot Lineup

Connected Robotics, the Tokyo-based startup that makes food robots, announced yesterday that it has raised a ¥850M ($7.8 million USD) Series A funding round. The round was led by Global Brain Corporation, with participation from 31VENTURES Global Innovation Fund, UTokyo Innovation Platform Co., Ltd., Sony Innovation Fund, and 500 Startups JP, L.L.C. This brings the total amount raised by Connected Robotics to ¥950M ($8.73 million USD).

Connected Robotics currently has two food robots: the OctoChef, which makes fried octopus balls known as Tokoyaki, a popular street food in Japan; and the Reita robot, which serves up soft serve ice cream. With the new money, Connected Robotics will accelerate research and development of new products: its automated dishwasher robot, a hot snacks robot for convenience stores, and an automatic breakfast cooking robot service dubbed “Loraine.”

The food service industry in Japan faces many of the same labor challenges as the U.S. Potential workers are avoiding the hard, repetitive, sometimes dangerous jobs at restaurants. Adding pressure to this labor crunch, Japan is facing an aging population, with 20 percent of its populace 65 years or older (and that number is projected to shoot up past 35 percent by 2050).

Robots and other automated systems can help alleviate this human labor shortage, and a number of companies are jumping in with their automated solutions. Sony has partnered with Carnegie-Mellon University to develop food robots. Miso Robotics’ Flippy is grilling and frying. LG is building a Flippy-like robot with CJ Foodville. And Dishcraft just unveiled its high-volume dishwashing robot.

We’ll actually be taking a first-hand look at food robots in Japan at our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit: Japan next month. If you know of any good robots serving food in Tokyo, drop us a line and we’ll check it out.

YPC Wants to Bring Fast Food Robotics to Fresh Food Cooking

We know that robots can cook up hamburgers, fry tater tots, and even make delicious bowls of food in high volume restaruants. But YPC Technologies wants to put that fast food style of robot to work making more complicated dishes like salmon filets, mushroom risotto, or even raspberry sorbet.

Based in Montreal, Canada, YPC (which stands for Your Personal Chef) has built a robotic workstation that its says can make high quality complex, fresh-cooked meals. Right now the YPC robot uses an articulating arm which grabs ingredients, pours them out into various multi-cookers and other devices that do the chopping, stirring and cooking. The YPC robot can make thousands of recipes and, depending on the complexity of the dishes ordered, can cook roughly 100 dishes per hour.

For all of its robotic bells and whistles, however, YPC Co-Founder and CEO Gunnar Grass told me by phone that YPC is not intended to be a fully autonomous kitchen. Humans will still be around for tasks like re-stocking ingredients and doing the final presentations. “The plating of the dishes is very difficult to achieve with robots,” Grass said, “in the long run we’ll automate 60 percent of kitchen operations.”

Grass stressed that this version of the cooking robot with the articulating arm is very much in the prototype phase, and will go through much more innovation, including the addition of a two-axis arm. Eventually, Grass said YPC will probably take up 40 sq. meters (a little more 400 sq. ft.), so it’s around the same size as the PAZZI automated pizza restaurant.

At first, YPC wants to own and operate its own robot eateries and is targeting mid-volume traffic areas like co-working spaces and retirement homes. It might also partner with a food service operation like Sedexo to be in university food halls that have more than one dining option. The YPC is not meant for high-volume sites like arenas or cafeterias that service thousands of people at once.

Co-working spaces actually seem like an ideal environment for a YPC system. There are plenty of office workers who want a good meal without having to leave the office, but there aren’t so many orders as to overwhelm the articulating arm.

While robots like Flippy are already working shifts, and Creator and Spyce are robot restaurants already open to the public, YPC is still very much in its early stages. Grass said his company raised a pre-seed round of funding, and that the operating prototype still needs to get the appropriate regulatory licenses before they go more public.

YPC is illustrative of the fact that automation in dining won’t be limited to just high throughput venues like fast food restaurants and arenas. Eateries that service smaller, but steady customer bases will also be able to take advantage of food robots, and will be able to provide a wider variety of meals than just burgers and tater tots.

Briggo Lands its Robot Barista at the SFO Airport Next Month

If you have an early flight out of San Francisco International (SFO) airport at the end of next month, you can caffeinate up with the help of Briggo’s robot barista. The Austin, TX based company announced today that it will launch its automated Coffee Haus robot-coffee kiosk at SFO on July 28th UPDATE: Briggo informed us after publication that it has changed the date and will be up in the coming month.

The Briggo Coffee Haus is a fully automated kiosk that serves a variety of hot and cold coffee and tea drinks, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Customers can order a coffee ahead of time using the Briggo app or purchase one through the machine’s tablet.

The SFO Coffee Haus is the first Briggo machine outside of Texas and will be located inside Terminal 3 next to the security entrance. Though Briggo thinks of itself as a coffee company that sources and roasts its own beans, it will feature rotating blends of Bay Area coffee from Verve and techie-favorite, Sightglass. This will be the second airport location for Briggo’s automated barista: the first one opened at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in July of last year, and a second Briggo machine was added there last month.

Briggo isn’t even the only coffee robot going into SFO this year. San Francisco-based company Cafe X will also be launching its automated coffee kiosk later this summer. We reached out to the company to confirm the installation date and will update when we hear back.

You’ll be seeing a lot more automated eating and drinking experiences at airports in the coming years. Robots like Briggo and Cafe X will be joined by high-end vending machines like Yo-Kai Express, which offer a Michelin star chef-created menu. Food robots will be able to quickly and conveniently feed the high volume of people in a hurry at all hours of the day (and never spell your name wrong on your coffee cup).

To promote its SFO opening, Briggo has hooked up with Lyft to provide Briggo patrons with a 15 percent discount on their next Lyft ride to or from SFO. Normally, we wouldn’t mention marketing campaigns, but this discount is another example of food and beverage companies working with ride-sharing companies to, err, drive traffic. In a similar move, TGIFriday’s has been handing out Uber vouchers to pay for customers’ rides to its restaurants.

We haven’t had Briggo’s coffee yet (haven’t flown to Austin in a while), but it’s got a 4-star rating on Yelp, where customers mostly marvel at the technology. Maybe we’ll need to book a flight down to San Francisco just for a chance to try the coffee.

Dishcraft Comes Out of Stealth, Shows Off its New Robot Dishwasher and Dishes as a Service

We knew Dishcraft was working on a dishwashing robot, but until today, we didn’t know what it would look like. The company publicly unveiled its robot and I’ll be honest, it’s not what I was expecting.

Meant for high-volume eateries like cafeterias, there are two parts to the Dishcraft system. First, dirty dishes are dropped off and stacked vertically on a special cart. Once full, a human wheels the cart into the machine, which grabs each dish individually and inserts it into a rotating wheel. The wheel spins the dirty plate face down and into position where it’s sprayed with water and scrubbed clean in seconds. The scrubbed plate is then rotated again where cameras and computer vision software inspect it for any debris left on the plate before exiting the machine into a dishrack or going back in for another scrub. Check out this video of it in action:

Dishcraft Dishwashing Robot in Action

There are some things to note about the Dischraft system. First, it only does dishware — not glasses or silverware. Those are still done by traditional dishwashing machines. Dishcraft also doesn’t sanitize the dishes, that is done by existing machines in a cafeteria or restaurant.

But because Dishcraft is only scrubbing the dishes, it only uses cold water and the brush to clean. The water acts as a lubricant for the brush to get all the gunk off. The machine doesn’t use any chemicals and the water can be recycled. By focusing solely on the cleaning of dishes, Dishcraft says it can provide a faster, more consistent cleaning experience with better ergonomics and less breakage.

Dishcraft is part of a larger push towards automation in the restaurant industry. Miso Robotics‘ Flippy cooks food, Bear Robotics‘ Penny expedites meals and busses tables, and restaurants like Creator and Spyce are built around their respective robots. It’s not hard to envision a future where all of these robots are brought together under one automated restaurant roof.

All this automation, however, does displace human workers, which creates its own set of societal issues. Dishcraft says its robot is filling a need right now because hiring and retaining dishwashers is actually a huge problem for restaurants, and if dishes don’t get washed, an entire restaurant grinds to a halt. Dishcraft Co-Founder and CEO Linda Pouliot told me by phone that using a robot for dishwashing can create a safer work environment for people because you eliminate things like slips on wet surfaces and hot water burns from overhead hoses spraying off dishes.

For restaurants or cafeterias in need of automating their dishwashing, Dishcraft offers two options. A Dishcraft robot can be leased and installed on-site, or they can use Dishcraft’s “dishes as a service.” This “DaaS” option works much like linen service, only with plates. Dishcraft drops off enough dishware for two days (or so) worth of service and then comes and collects the dirties to wash them off-site. Dishcraft is in pilots right now, and pricing was not disclosed.

Dishcraft has raised more than $25 million to date from investors including Baseline Ventures, First Round Capital, and Lemnos. Pouliot spoke at our Articulate food robot conference earlier this year along with Miso Robotics’ CEO, Dave Zito about Building Towards Integrated Robot, Human Work Environments. You can watch the entire session here:

ArticulATE 2019: Building Towards Integrated Robot, Human Work Environments

Welp. Robots Have Knives Now, and Know How to Use Them (to Slice Onions)

Well, fellow humans, we had a good run, but our time is over. Robots have their knives out — literally — and know how to use them.

Terminator-esque teasing aside, IEEE Spectrum has a video roundup of some of cutting-edge (sorry) robotics research being done right now. Included among the videos is “Robotic Cutting: Mechanics and Control of Knife Motion,” by Xiaoqian Mu, Yuechuan Xue, and Yan-Bin Jia from Iowa State University, in Ames, Iowa, USA.

You may think that having a robot to slice an onion mainly entails a big mechanical arm slamming a knife down, but you’d be wrong. The researchers created a program that combines and coordinates pressing, pushing and slicing motions. From the research paper’s Introduction:

Cutting skills such as chop, slice, and dice are mostly beyond the reach of today’s robots. Technical challenges come not just from manipulation of soft and irregularly-shaped objects, but more from doing so while fracture is happening. The latter requires planning and force control based on reliable modeling of an object’s deformation and fracture as it is being cut. The knife’s movement needs to be adjusted to progress in terms of material fracture. Its trajectory may need to be replanned in the case of an unforeseeable situation (e.g., appearance of a bone).

Robotic Cutting: Mechanics and Control of Knife Motion

As you can see from the video, this particular robot won’t be wowing crowds at a Benihana anytime soon, but it shows once again that robots are getting more proficient at higher-skilled tasks. Automation is coming for food sector jobs, and while we think of them right now in terms of flipping burgers and bussing tables, robots will be automating more and more tasks in restaurants, like prepping vegetables.

Dishcraft, for example, is still pretty tight lipped around what it’s working on, but the company has talked about building robots to do specific tasks in restaurant kitchens like prep work. Miso Robotics’ Flippy was created in part to take over dangerous tasks like working the grill and deep fryer in the kitchen, and the company has already talked about Flippy eventually chopping vegetables.

While there are still many issues to work through with the rise of robots, having them handle knives in the kitchen (and saving countless fingertips from lacerations) is probably not such a bad thing.

Bear Robotics Launches Second-Gen Restaurant Robot, Adds Swappable Tray System

Bear Robotics has officially launched the second-generation version of its Penny restaurant robot. The autonomous robot, which shuttles food and dishes between the front and back of house, now features a versatile tray system for carrying more and different types of items.

With its new design, Penny has lost its bowling pin shape and single carrying surface. Instead, Penny 2.0 is more cylindrical in shape, and can sport up to three tiers of carrying surface. Not only can Penny carry more, a new swappable tray system means it can be configured to carry any combination of food, drinks or bus tub.

On the inside, Bear updated the smarts of Penny, giving the robot enhanced obstacle-avoidance technology, and while the company didn’t go into specifics, a tablet can now be attached to Penny for expanded customer interaction capabilities.

Penny 2.0 is being shown at the National Restaurant Association trade show this weekend and is available now. While Bear doesn’t disclose actual pricing, Penny is offered on a monthly subscription, which includes the robot, setup and mapping of a restaurant and technical support.

Penny is among a wave of robots coming to restaurants in the near future: Flippy makes burgers and fries up chicken tenders, Dishcraft is still stealthily working on automating tasks in the kitchen, and there are entire establishments like Creator and Spyce built around robotic cooking systems.

Any discussion of automation always involves the loss of human jobs. John Ha, CEO of Bear Robotics, actually owned a restaurant and built Penny after noticing how hard servers work, often for little pay. By automating the expediting of food and bussing, Bear aims to free up humans to provide higher levels of customer service (ideally earning those humans higher tips).

Ha and Linda Pouliot, CEO of Dishcraft recently spoke at our recent Articulate Food Robotics conference about the challenges restaurants face, and how robotics can help. You can watch their session in full right here.

Articulate 2019: Robots in Restaurants

Video: Cafe X and Byte Technologies on Data Rabbit Holes and the One Thing Your Data Team Must Track

The beauty of running an automated or robot-powered business like the coffee-slinging Cafe X or Byte Technologies smart fridges, is that you generate a lot of data. What people are purchasing, when they purchase it, where, how often, etc. All this data powers demand algorithms that help companies like Cafe X and Byte be more efficient by accurately determining business critical decisions such as products to offer and how much inventory to carry.

The downside of running an automated or robot-powered business like Cafe X or Byte Technologies is that you generate a lot of data. Too much data, actually. You could easily spend most of your time diving down a data rabbit hole, trying to fine-tune demand algorithms and actually wind up making them less useful.

So how do you determine what data to capture and what data to pay attention to?

Glad you asked! Because the role of data was central to my discussion with Cafe X COO Cynthia Yeung and Byte Technologies Founder Lee Mokri during the Forecasting, Personalization & Customer Service Challenges for Robotic Retail panel at our ArticulATE food robotics conference last month.

It was fascinating to sit down and learn from Yeung and Mokri about how their respective companies tackle the data issue, and how they use that data to maximize product variety within the limited square footage of their automated storefronts.

Plus, for all you entrepreneurs out there, Yeung explains the one thing you absolutely need to do when building out your data team and plan.

Watch the full video below, and check back for more of our full sessions from ArticulATE 2019.

ArticulATE 2019: Forecasting, Personalization & Customer Service Challenges for Robotic Retail

Report: Food Robotics Market to Hit $3.1 Billion by 2025

One of the big reasons we put on our ArticulATE food robotics conference earlier this month, was that we could see the rise in automation throughout the food stack. Now Meticulous Research projects some numbers for that growth, with a report out today saying the size of the global food robotics market will hit $3.1 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 12.7 percent between 2019 and 2025.

According to the press announcement, there are a number of factor that will drive this growth, including: “increasing food safety regulations, rising demand for advanced food packaging, growing demand to improve productivity, increasing production of low-cost robots, increase in investments for automated solutions in food industry, and growing demand for reducing production cost and increasing food shelf-life leading to increased adoption of robotic systems.”

Meticulous Research predicts that articulating robots (think: Flippy) will be the most popular form of food robot because their speed and accuracy continues to improve while their price keeps dropping.

Europe is the biggest user of food robots, followed by North America and Asia-Pacific. However, Meticulous Research predicts “significant growth” in food robot use in the Asia-Pacific during the forecast period because of investment in automation as well as growing demand for food safety regulation and packaged goods.

If you follow The Spoon then this report shouldn’t be a huge surprise. For the second year in a row, there were a record number of robots shipped in North America, with the food industry among the top non-automotive sectors buying.

More anecdotally, during our ArticulATE conference, we heard from companies across the food world talking about how a growing global population and its desire to, you know, eat, combined with a labor shortage is generating increase interest automation. As this report notes, these food robots are getting better (Flippy is on its third generation), smaller and cheaper. And from my personal experience, robots are pretty great at making food as well.

LG to Develop Food Robots with CJ Foodville

Looks like LG is getting into the dedicated food robot space with the announcement today that it has formed a partnership with Korean restaurant chain, CJ Foodville. According to the AJU Business Daily, LG will build a Flippy-like robot that will begin testing this year.

LG’s move into more dedicated food robotics isn’t that surprising as the company already has its line of CLOi robots to help out the hospitality industry. Plus, all of its main rivals have their own food robot initiatives as well. Samsung has its robotic arm kitchen helper, Sony partnered with Carnegie-Mellon to develop food-related robots, and Panasonic is helping roboticize the Haidilao restaurant chain in China.

LG and CJ Foodville didn’t provide details about the program, a senior official at LG was quoted by the Korean Herald as saying “Robots will help with repetitive chores on behalf of human employees while the employees can provide better service and value for customers.”

This is a common refrain and one we hear whenever robots are introduced into the workforce whether it be behind the grill or roaming the grocery aisle. We talked a lot about the issues of robots and human labor at our recent ArticulATE automation summit this week. One of the issues panelists brought up is that quick service restaurants are facing a labor crunch, with one of the reasons being that a lot of people would prefer the flexibility of driving for Uber rather than working in a kitchen.

Automation in the food business is inevitable, so expect even more robot announcements from LG and other consumer electronics giants throughout this year.

Yo-Kai Express Dishes Out Delicious Ramen Bowls (and Accepts Airline Vouchers)

In the not-too-far-off future, if you’re stuck at the airport at an ungodly hour, at least you’ll have good food to eat, thanks to a wave of high-tech vending machines like the Yo-Kai Express.

Yo-Kai Express is built for high-traffic areas (like airports) and can dispense piping hot bowls of ramen 24 hours a day. Today I got a chance to watch a Yo-Kai in action, taste its wares (it was delicious!) and see how it stacks up among the cohort of new high-tech vending machines coming up.

“Yo-Kai is a Japanese ghost that can appear anywhere at any time,” Yo-Kai Founder and CEO Andy Lin told me in front of his machine at the Metreon in San Francisco. This is pretty much how Lin envisions his machine: popping up anywhere so people can eat at any time. Office buildings, airports, malls, any place where there are a lot of people who might be looking for a quick meal.

There are four menu choices, costing between $11 and $12. Each machine holds 40 frozen bowls of ingredients such as meat, vegetables and noodles. When someone orders their food, there is some secret, proprietary stuff that happens behind the scenes to hydrate and heat the contents, and less than a minute later, out comes a sealed bowl of literally piping hot soup (there’s actually a caution sign warning customers how hot the food is). The machine also gives you a little packet of utensils that includes a spoon, fork, napkin and chopsticks.

Lin says the key to its preparation is that the company has developed a flash freezing process that minimizes the size of the ice crystals that can form and damage the food. Because the food is stored frozen in the machine, Yo-Kai can prepare and freeze everything in a central kitchen. When the machine runs low, it alerts corporate HQ, which can then bring replacements (kept frozen the entire time).

The Yo-Kai made its debut at the Metreon in Feb. 2018, and is now in 14 additional locations including Tesla, Netflix, and Capital One offices in the Bay Area. The machines are free for the company to install, with Yo-Kai collecting all the revenue. This provides offices with a way of providing hot food for office workers, without incurring huge costs.

Lin didn’t want to provide sales numbers, but said that if a machine sells 40 bowls a day, it will recoup its cost in four months.

One of the more interesting aspects of Yo-Kai Express is that in addition to credit card, mobile payments and even cryptocurrencies, the machine will also accept airline vouchers to buy your food. Though there aren’t any Yo-Kais set up in airports yet (the first one goes into SFO in June), Lin said the company is working with United Airlines. By accepting the voucher, if your flight is delayed or you get bumped or whatever and the airline gives you a food voucher, you can use it at Yo-Kai after hours when other airport restaurants are closed, which is very smart.

Yo-Kai certainly isn’t the only company that sees high-end vending machines as the next wave of high-volume food service. Chowbotics’ Sally robot is busy making fresh salads in offices and hospitals, and while it hasn’t come to market yet, Basil Street is developing a pizza machine that heats up frozen pizzas.

Based in Sunnyvale, CA, Yo-Kai has raised $1 million in seed funding, and has a mix of 13 execs, contractors and other employees working for the company. Lin said the company is busy prepping the next generation of its Express box, which will feature two dispensers so people don’t have to wait in line for a long time.

Yo-Kai won’t be able to make your long flight delays go away, but at least that time lost will become more tasty.

Chowbotics Finds Robot-Made Salad Success in Hospitals

Hospitals, by and large, are places that you want to get in and out of quickly. But they are also places that are open 24 hours a day, with staff and visitors working or milling about throughout the night. This type of always-awake environment, it turns out, is the perfect place for Chowbotics‘ food robot, Sally.

Sally is a standalone salad (and bowl food) making robot. There are currently 50 Sally robots deployed around the world, and Chowbotics Founder and CEO, Deepak Sekar told me in a phone interview that the company has found particular success early on in hospitals.

To give you a sense of how Chowbotics defines success, Sekar said that locations that buy or lease a Sally need to sell 7 bowls a day to break even. At a Sally deployment in Las Vegas last month, Sekar reports that Sally was selling 120 bowls a day, and at a new Sally that came online last week at the North Oaks Health Care hospital in Lousiana, Sekar said they were selling 65 to 70 bowls a day.

One of the reasons for the success of Sally’s North Oaks locations is that the hospital’s cafeteria closes down at 2 p.m., so there is no place for staff or visitors to get fresh (as fresh as a hospital cafeteria is, anyway) food later in the afternoon or throughout the night. Sekar said that though there is a definite lunchtime peak in sales, there are sustained sales throughout the afternoon and evening, and another spike at midnight when shifts change, and people on the hunt for something to fresh to eat instead of vending machine food.

Sekar is so high on hospitals right now that they are an area of focus for the company. “Hospitals in general are doing really well, because they are places where people are hanging around at midnight or early in the morning,” said Sekar, “We find robots are a great fit.”

Because Sally is connected, Sekar can also see what types of salads people are creating. Though each Sally comes with standard recipes that you can order (e.g. Roasted Chicken Chopped Salad), Sekar said that 85 percent of bowls served were customized (Romaine lettuce and chicken were the most popular ingredients, edamame and ham the least).

Chowbotics isn’t stopping at salads, however. The company announced last year that it was expanding into bowl foods and is currently rolling out Indian, Mediterranean and Latin menus options in Sally. Cafeterias could become a thing of the past in places like hospitals as high-tech vending operations like Sally, or Cafe X’s robo-barista, and Basil St. Cafe’s hot pizza oven all come online to satisfy cravings any time of day or night.

If you’re curious about Sally, or have a question for Deepak, both robot and human will be live (and, err, plugged in) at our upcoming ArticulATE food robot summit coming up on April 16 in San Francisco! Get your tickets and get a glimpse of our automated future!

Slack Chat Recap: The Perils and Promise of the Food Robot Revolution

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver‘s main piece over the weekend was on robots and automation. If you are in the food service industry you can (and should) watch the clip below, but I can also save you a click: Oliver basically says the whole situation around jobs being automated is… complicated.

As we’ve written before, the food service industry in particular is ripe for automation, and it’s one of the topics we covered during our recent Spoon Slack Chat with Megan Mokri, CEO of Byte Technology, Charlie Andersen, CEO of Augean Robotics, and David Rodriguez, Head of Business Development for Kiwi.

Admittedly, all of these companies are working to help bring automation across different segments of the food stack, so they have some skin in the game. But they were still circumspect about its societal benefits and drawbacks. When I asked the panel what the industry should do about the human displacement caused by robots and automation, the response was mostly optimistic (answered copied directly from Slack):

Megan Mokri (Byte): So much to say on this one. The reality is many industries in the US are facing a labor shortage – food and ag is hugely impacted, as is retail. Automation is critical if these industries are to keep pace with growing and shifting consumer behaviors.

Charlie Andersen: Re: automation and the impact on labor, this story is still being written. Certainly, the impact of automation is to enable one person to do far more work, or to remove people from tasks they no longer want to do. But in the process, more tasks are created and new opportunities are unlocked. (in the case of farming, there is way way too much work to do already)

David Rodriguez: The size of the markets we build should increase the total number of human operators! In our case, we need fewer people to do more deliveries, but we do so many deliveries that we need to hire more and more people!

But our Robo-Slack Chat wasn’t all dour news about an impending robot revolution. There are lots of cool things about robots, too!

One is how Byte’s automated smart fridges are stocked. Because the fridges automatically keep track of their contents, Byte has insight into which products are popular and where, and can use that data to power Byte’s demand algorithms and inventory planning, and can even allow for dynamic pricing. Byte also leases out their technologies to CPG and other food service companies, allowing them to more efficiently stock their own Byte-powered fridges.

But you can’t stock those fridges if you don’t have food, and as Charlie Andersen reminded us, agriculture and working on a farm is hard work. Robots can carry out some tasks more safely than a human could. For instance, the Augean Burro can carry 150+ pounds of grapes for hours in 110 degree weather without getting heat stroke or dehydrated. But in addition to labor changes, robots can also push farms towards more organic production because this can also reduce the amount of chemicals needed and the overall environmental intensity needed for fruit and vegetable production.

From that example, it’s easy to see robots as lending a helping hand, but in the city, robots running around underfoot could be seen as more of a nuisance, and become a target for theft or vandalism. One way Kiwi combats this is by designing the robot in a way that creates empathy from people looking at it. For instance, the Kiwi-bot has big eyes, making the robot look “cute.” This cuteness makes mean ole humans reluctant to harm the robot. Rodriguez says that in Berkeley they’ve had zero instances of theft and only a few cases of vandalism.

We are only at the beginning of seeing what robots are capable of and how they will literally change – and complicate – our world. But Slack Chats like this, as well as our upcoming ArticulATE conference in April (get your tickets!) help drive the conversation so we can figure some of those answers out now.

Automation: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)