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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

kitchens

MIT & NVIDIA Researchers Are Building Tech That Could Enable Better Kitchen-Robot Precision

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 wanted to create a task-planning system that performed well in complicated scenarios with many obstacles.

The project focused on developing a task and motion planning (TAMP) algorithm to help robotic systems solve mobile manipulation problems in difficult environments. The core of the algorithm is PIGINet, which the group describes as a transformer-based learning system that, for each proposed task plan, helps the system more quickly understand the success probability of a given motion trajectory.

Today’s robotic system task planners often fail when faced with the reality of highly complex and infinitely variable real-world scenarios, getting bogged down in processing how to navigate through the unique physical geometries of their environments. The seemingly infinite variety of small things in a kitchen – random items on a counter, the different locations of a pot on a cooktop, open doors and drawers – may be easy for a human to handle but can give a robot fits. With the PIGINet transformer, the system will be able to more quickly process through and understand the success probabilities of each course of action due to the specific start state and the given obstacles within.

According to the group, the PIGINet transformer-enabled task planner gives the robot a better chance of success by better understanding the various scenarios and each’s feasibility before they are executed. Their initial experiments showed that using PIGINet substantially improves planning efficiency, cutting down runtime by 80% on problems in relatively simple scenarios and up to 50% in more complex ones.

While the group’s initial effort focused on kitchen and food-planning tasks, it believes its system can be applied to other tasks within and outside the home.

While there have been a lot of venture capital dollars and product development hours spent on developing kitchen robotics, you can see by this project and those similar to it just how early we are in developing truly advanced kitchen automation. The kitchen is one of the most complex and variable work environments, and creating a robot that doesn’t simply automate a single repeatable process is extremely difficult. With projects like this one and EPIC Kitchens, we are laying the foundation for our robot chef future.

You can watch a video on their project and how it works below:

PIGINet: Sequence-Based Plan Feasibility Prediction for Efficient Task and Motion Planning

Johnny Grey on the Post-COVID Kitchen: No Cabinets, Bigger Pantries, More Pleasure

With COVID keeping many of us at home, kitchens are taking on a bigger role than ever before. They’re not just the place we cook meals; they’re also our offices, a place to teach kids homework, the background of our Zoom video calls as we cook along with family.

Considering we’ve long considered the kitchen the heart of the home, it’s no surprise that they’re shifting as we spend more and more time homebound. But how will the kitchen transform to better suit our new needs during quarantine?

To answer that question we turned to Johnny Grey, a British design leader specializing in — you guessed it — kitchens. Today Grey (and a few surprise guests) joined us for our latest Spoon Virtual Event, titled The Future of Kitchen Design in a Post-COVID19 World. He talked about some of the constants of kitchen design, how to embrace the DIY, and how the kitchen is a sort of “3D timepiece.” Here are a few of the highlights:

Fewer cabinets, more pantries
If there’s one part of conventional kitchen design that Grey absolutely hates, it’s cabinets. He thinks they take up too much space in the core of the kitchen itself, which should be a more social space.

In fact, Grey’s overarching goal with kitchen design seems to be to make it a more pleasant space for gathering. To that end, he’s a big fan of kitchen islands (or peninsulas), ideally ones with adjustable heights that can go from a bar space to a dining table.

When asked what he thought we could learn from the past, Grey answered in one word: pantries. He likes a walk-in pantry because you can see things in front of you — like all those bulk bags of dry goods you bought — and you don’t have to rely on dreaded cabinets to store everything.

Where does smart tech fit in?
For Grey, smart tech does have a role to play in kitchens of the future. Specifically when it comes to two things: precision and safety. Grey also emphasized that kitchen technology can help generations age in place. If individuals can cook for themselves, he theorizes that they won’t have to move to assisted living facilities as quickly — thus keeping them home for longer.

Photo: Innit and Sharp

The kitchen as a timepiece
During the virtual event Grey unveiled a new concept he’s been working on. Called the Evening Kitchen, he explained that the kitchen has multiple different lives during each 24-hour cycle. During the day it may be an area for quick meal prep, but in the evening it morphs into a bistro, a nightclub, or even a quiet living room, depending on the circumstances. Grey calls the kitchen a sort of “3D timepiece.”

For that reason, the evening kitchen must look different than the kitchen of daytime. Grey talks about the power of lighting, which gives intimacy, as well as smell and music to transform the space. If you’re curious you can watch his video explaining the concept here.

Especially now, embrace joy
Especially now, kitchens should be a place of joy. “It should be a pleasure to use your kitchen,” Grey said. To make it pleasurable, designers should think about touch, ease of movement, and even color. They could set up places to set a chair in the sun. Consumers themselves can do a lot to improve their kitchen. “Embrace the DIY,” Grey told the audience.

Grey also urged listeners not to put too much pressure on themselves to de-clutter, especially now that the kitchen table is also a coworking space and/or classroom. “It’s not really how people can live,” he said.

Overall, it was a fascinating conversation and — bonus — you get to enjoy Grey’s soothing British accent. You can watch the full video below.

Kitchen Design in a Post-COVID World: A Conversation with Kitchen Designer Johnny Grey

Finally, don’t forget to mark your calendar for our next event on May 21st 10am PT, when Gingko Bioworks program director Sudeep Agarwala will talk about fermentation as a food tech platform.

“WeWork” for Food Entrepreneurs Gets Financial Shot in the Arm

Budding butchers, bakers, and (edible) candlestick makers have another innovative option to provide the vital tools, training, and resources to facilitate movement from startup home food entrepreneurs to the realization of their goals of commercial success.

New York-based Pilotworks (formerly FoodWorks), billed as a “WeWork for food startups,” has received $13 million in expansion capital from Acre Venture Partners, a fund backed by Campbell’s Soup, along with TechStars, a funding and mentoring program. The money will be used for expansion to markets, such as Chicago and Dallas, along with the development of the necessary properties, culinary infrastructure, and staffing.

A company press release reveals the company was founded in 2016 and has since helped more than 250 food and beverage startups get off the ground. Pilotworks says that more than 70% of the businesses it has worked with are women or minority-owned.

“We’re very excited to add so many great strategic partners and continue our work of empowering anyone to start a food business successfully. We will be adding new units: Newark just opened, and Chicago and Dallas are slated to open in December alongside our existing kitchens in Brooklyn, Portland, and Providence, as well as furthering our presence in New York City. We are also excited to continue expanding our services and offerings across the entire food stack,” said Pilotworks CEO and co-founder Nick Devane.

The company’s website says it offers a full range of services that go beyond a mere stove and fridge. Everything from garbage and linen service, to assistance with branding and web design, is available to its members. Companies such as Aida Eats, Mac & Son, BOONBOX, Dank, and Crown Jewel Beverages are veterans of Pilotworks programs.

While the association with WeWork is fine for general identification purposes, it fails to capture the essence of what makes the boom in community commercial kitchens a hot commodity. Pilotworks enters a crowded space that spans options from highly regarded Food Corridor—a community and network of commercial kitchens that offers similar services to Pilotworks in a more federated manner—to individual shared-use kitchen incubators such as Capital Kitchens in Austin. The website Culinary Incubator offers a database and list of 725 shared-use kitchens in the United States.

What looms as a difference-maker for Pilotworks is its association with Campbell’s Soup. The New Jersey-based food and beverage giant could use this network of startup kitchens to find the next great idea to bring in house and take to the global market. That said, Tyson Foods, General Foods, and others also are operating accelerators with the same endgame in mind.

Worth noting is the startup goldrush led by Pilotworks and other similar endeavors focused on major markets that are either population centers (New York, Dallas, Chicago) or food meccas (Portland, Providence). A tour of any farmers market in smaller cities would prove there are some great food-next ideas worth nurturing outside marquee locations.