Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

robot

Cafe X Debuts 2nd Gen Coffee Robot Kiosk in Downtown San Francisco

Cafe X, the robotic coffeeshop startup, debuted its second generation robot barista kiosk on the streets of downtown San Francisco today.

Unlike other dedicated storefront locations, this new version of the Cafe X robot is a standalone kiosk that sits literally on the sidewalk at the corner of Sansome and Bush in SF’s Financial District. In addition to the updated form factor, the new version of the robot can handle multiple drink sizes (8 oz and 12 oz), clear cups, and also does nitro-infused cold brew coffee.

Similar to Briggo, Cafe X plans to own and operate its machines and place them in commercial buildings, airports and other high-traffic areas to deliver quality coffee via an automated experience. Customers can order drinks with their phone or through a tablet next to the kiosk. Just like the Cafe X stores, the kiosk will always have a human on hand to help people with the ordering process and to educate customers about the coffee choices.

Unlike Briggo, which hides its machinations within its kiosk housing and is more of a high-end machine than a traditional robot, Cafe X proudly displays its articulating robotic arm front and center behind a giant pane of clear glass. “It’s part of the experience,” Cafe X CEO, Henry Hu, told me during a visit to the kiosk today, “We want people to see the robot making the drink, so they don’t feel like they are just at a vending machine.”

As part of that experience, Cafe X has added new gestures to the robot arm, which can now do things like wave at customers after it has finished making their drink.

Hu told me that another reason they use the arm is that it’s more modular, which comes in handy if they want to change the machine. For instance, Cafe X built its own gripper for this generation robot, enabling it to handle the different types of cups and to pull the tap on the cold brew. “If we want to expand the menu or change items seasonally,” said Hu, “we can just swap parts out.”

Hu also said that the company has been fielding licensing interest in the new kiosk from around the world. For the immediate future though, Cafe X will focus on rolling out more standalone kiosks in San Francisco.

I got a hot chocolate with oat milk from the kiosk today and it was pretty delicious. And judging by the number of people who stopped, gawked and smiled as they watched the robot whip up their drinks, the Cafe X show will probably catch on.

Zume Unveils Its New Pizza Robot, Vincenzo

Zume, the Bay Area startup that uses data, robotics and mobile ovens to optimize pizza delivery, today announced that it has added Vincenzo, a new robot that will take over the dangerous task of taking pizzas crusts out of hot ovens, to the company’s roster.

Before getting into the specifics of Vincenzo (named after the Italian gentleman who would fly from Italy to maintain Zume’s pizza ovens), it’s important to understand how Zume works.

Zume, which only operates in certain locations in the Bay Area, uses data analytics and AI to precisely forecast how many pizzas (and what types) will be needed for deliveries that evening. To prepare the pizzas for delivery, the crusts are par-baked before toppings are added at the production facility.

Par-baking the crust used to require a human sticking their arms in and out of 800 degree ovens hundreds of times a day to remove pizzas and place them on the appropriate rack. This type of repetitive motion could lead to burns that injure us fleshy humans. Vincenzo’s robot arm, on the other hand (no pun intended) feels no pain, and can remove a crust without tearing or breaking it every 8 seconds.

“We’ve had this hardcore point of view on automation of labor,” Alex Garden, CEO of Zume told me. “There is social responsibility around this. Automation exists to improve the quality of human lives.”

In addition to being impervious to pain, Vincenzo is also precise. Once pizzas are topped by humans, Vincenzo pulls them off another conveyor belt and, with guidance from Zume’s AI, places them on a corresponding specified rack that goes on the van where they are fully cooked en route to delivery.

Vincenzo joins the growing Zume robot family which also includes Bruno, who loads pizzas into the oven, and sauce bots Pepe and Giorgio. But Garden is quick to point out that he does not see robots as replacements for humans. “We are co-botic, not robotic,” he said. Garden also said that robots taking the more dangerous, repetitive jobs frees up people to do higher-level tasks, like caring for the pizza’s mother dough.

Another job that humans are (presumably) better at is that of company president, and Zume just added a new one. Zume also announced today that Rhonda Lesinski-Woolf is now President of Zume Pizza. She joins the company after having served as Sr. Vice President of Schools for Revolution Foods. Prior to that, she was Chief Marketing Officer and Sr. Vice President of Product Management at Del Monte.

In addition to managing robots and humans, Lesinski will also need to fend off the company’s automated competition. Making pizza seems like an increasingly popular vocation for robots: Little Caesar’s has a patent for a pizza robot, and over in Europe, EKIM just raised 2.2 million euros to build its own robot-pizza restaurant.

Zume is also expanding beyond its pizza origins. In April the company announced that it would open up its data and logistics platform to other restaurants, and partnered with Welbilt to create vans that could cook other types of cuisine on the go.

If you like pizza robots, you should definitely check out The Spoon Automat, our weekly podcast about food robots and AI.

Podcast: Meet Luna the Robotic Monitoring System for Greenhouses

Produce is grown across somewhere between 250 and 300 million square feet of commercial greenhouse space in the U.S.. That’s a whole lot of crops that need to be monitored to make sure they are watered, properly lit and healthy.

Thankfully, iUnu (pronounced “yoo-noo”) is here to help. The company makes Luna, a robot that scurries around on rails mounted to the ceilings of greenhouses. Using a variety of cameras, sensors and computer vision, Luna helps greenhouse growers better understand and manage the welfare of their crops to improve overall yield.

For this week’s Automat podcast, I sat down with iUnu Co-Founder and CEO, Adam Greenberg to learn more about the culture around greenhouse growing, and how Luna works to make it better. Listen to our conversation here, or better yet, subscribe to The Automat, to get a weekly dose of food-related robots and AI.

Soft Robotics Gets a Firm Grip on $20 Million

Soft Robotics has raised $20 million to expand the use of its “air actuated soft elastomeric end effectors.” Put another way--the company just raised a bunch of money for its rubbery robot parts that can gently handle delicate items such as eggs and fruit without crushing them.

Robots, as we’ve written before, are great for manual, repetitive tasks, but traditional systems like suction cups or metal grippers have never been great at handling irregularly shaped or soft items. To accomplish that, Soft Robotics uses material science to mimic an octopus (see the TED video below for a full explainer), and the result is an attachment of rubbery-tipped appendages that can be added to existing industrial systems and used to pick, manipulate and sort all manner of items.

According to the company’s product page, Soft Robotics offers three different configurations of its attachment, each meant to handle different types of food ranging from apples to pastries to hamburger patties.

Using robots for picking, sorting and otherwise handling of food would mean faster, more consistent results that could happen twenty-four hours a day. Soft Robotics SuperPick bin-picking system, for example, can execute more than 600 picks in an hour.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Soft Robotics is going to use the new money to push further into the food and beverage sector. It’s not hard to instantly see where this technology could be beneficial throughout the food stack.

In agriculture, Soft Robotics’ grippers could be used for picking fruits without smushing them. In the produce supply chain, a soft touch would come in handy for gentle sorting and shipping. And restaurants like Zume and CaliBurger could most likely find use for a robot that could handle dough and tomatoes (and keep up with the other robots already in use there).

Soft Robotics has more than 100 customers and told the Journal that it had revenues of “less than $10 million” last year (though that was an 80 percent jump over the previous year). This is the second round of funding for the Cambridge, MA company, which had previously raised $5 million. This latest infusion was led by Hyperlane Venture Capital and includes Scale Venture Partners as well as the VC group at Honywell International.

With this new money, Soft Robotics will undoubtedly make their grippers even more robust, but it will be hard to top this video of them in use packing donuts.

Amazon’s Reported Robot Probably Won’t Just be a Mobile Alexa

News reports surfaced today that Amazon may be working on it’s own robot. According to Bloomberg, the retail giant has been working on a project codenamed “Vesta”(the Roman goddess of the hearth, home and family) and is being run out of Amazon’s Lab126 hardware R&D division, which came up with the Echo and Fire line of tablets and set-top boxes.

Sources tell Bloomberg that Vesta would be like a mobile Alexa, that follows people around. Vesta could also autonomously travel around a home using high end cameras and computer vision. Vesta could potentially be in home tests later this year and available for purchase in 2019.

Like with any futuristic news of this sort, it must be taken with a few grains of salt. I’ve no doubt that Amazon is working on a home robot, because Amazon is working on everything. But the idea that it will be a general mobile Alexa seems counterintuitive based on how Amazon normally works and how much the company believes in efficiency.

Let’s start with Alexa itself, the company’s voice controlled smart assistant. With Echo Dots being so cheap, it is much easier to outfit an entire house with a dozen of those small smart pucks than wait for a robot to follow you around to answer your questions or set a timer. Not to mention how much of an impediment stairs would be.

Additionally, as we’ve seen from patent filings and recent purchases, Amazon is looking at embedding itself deeper and more directly into devices. It’s at least exploring a smart fridge that can sniff out bad food, and a high-tech garden device that can see what types of food you are growing.

The company also recently purchased Blink, which made cloud-connected cameras, and Ring, maker of the connected doorbell. The Blink acquisition actually came with computer vision chip technology that the the company had developed. This type of computer vision could be used to help a robot navigate around couches, but more likely it could be shrunk down so you can put smart cameras in fridges and pantries to help you with household inventory management.

On top of all that, Alexa is being embedded into appliances like the LG SmartThinq line of refrigerators and ovens. This type of integration will enable more guided cooking — Alexa picks out a recipe based on what you have in your fridge and will tell the oven to preheat. In a kitchen this type of ethereal help seems more efficient than a small robot scurrying around to grab your parsley (not to mention running around your house brandishing a butcher knife).

Having said all that! I’m sure Bezos and Co. are working on a robot. In fact, last year Amazon received a patent for techniques for mobile device charging using robotics. My guess is whatever shape this robot takes will not just be another version of Alexa, but will surprise use with an entirely new use case.

Briggo Says Its Robot Barista Won’t Replace Coffee Shops

At first, your local coffee shop may fear Briggo, the company that has been building robot baristas for a decade now. But Briggo co-founder and CTO Chas Studor believes that his autonomous coffee making machines will actually make existing coffee shops better.

Briggo builds the fully autonomous robotic “Coffee Haus,” which takes up just 40 sq. feet. It’s meant to go in locations high-traffic areas such as corporate campuses, factories or airports. The company has four machines in use now across Austin with another one set to go up in the Austin airport.

Customers use an on-screen menu or the accompanying app to order, customize and pay for their drinks. Drinks can be pre-ordered through the app and once made, Coffee Haus will hold each drink in its own locked area and text you a code. When you arrive, type in the code and the drink is released.

The company is on its third generation machine. Each Coffee Haus can make up to 100 drinks per hour, hold 16 drinks at a time for customers, and can dispense 800 drinks before it needs to be re-stocked. It self-cleans and sanitizes and most of its bits are connected to the Internet, so it can pinpoint where something breaks down, and constantly sends data about grinds, pours, weights and brews back to headquarters.

But Briggo actually does more than build and deploy robots: the company controls its own full-stack solution. It has an internal team of hardware and software engineers building out its platform. It sources and roasts its own beans, and has crafted its own customized blend with the help of Scott McMartin, who used to do procurement for Starbucks. When a machine needs to be replenished or serviced, a Briggo employee goes out and does it.

Drinks are certainly a popular vocation choice for robots. In addition to Briggo, Cafe X has debuted its own barista-in-a-box, while companies like 6d bytes and Alberts are building smoothie-making robots. Drinks are a good use case for robots because people want them on the go and while there is room for improvisation, drink recipes are generally consistent (a doppio is a doppio).

Based in Austin, TX, Briggo has 40 employees and raised $12 million in a Series A round. The company partners with large food service management companies and installs the machines in campuses and cafeterias. Briggo will expand to Houston and Dallas next, before it ventures outside of Texas.

I spoke with Studor at the Specialty Coffee Expo here in Seattle. While he wants Briggo to make excellent coffee, he also wants to help change the coffee industry. Briggo can help reduce waste, he says, by creating coffee on demand, and not in large batches that get thrown out because they’ve sat out too long, and also reduce the use of items like milk and sugar because they are precisely dispensed in his machine.

Studor is adamant that Briggo won’t replace coffee shops. He believes people will still want the social interaction and experience that comes with them. What he hopes Briggo will do will help make those coffee shop experiences better. Because Briggo is built for high-traffic areas, coffee shops can focus on their own business to create the best human-powered coffee shop experience.

Alberts Brings Robot Smoothie Stations to Europe

The best way to start a story about Alberts robot Smoothie Stations is with an anecdote Co-Founder and CTO Glenn Mathijssen told me. When asked why their company was called “Alberts,” he said that they were trying to bring intelligent solutions to the market. Which made them think of Albert Einstein and the famous photo of him sticking his tongue out. “We’re not Einsteins, but we’re Alberts,” he said.

You can see this smart yet playful approach imbued in Alberts Smoothie Station. The bright, colorful robotic vending machines found in Brussels, Belgium, have transparent fronts so you can see the fresh fruit and vegetables (no yogurts, milks, juices or other sugar-adding ingredients) that it will blend into a smoothie for you, on the spot.

Out of the box, the Alberts Smoothie Station has six menus, but you can customize them to your liking if you download their app. For instance, you can specify that you want more mango and less banana, or more vitamin C. Using a QR code in the app, a Smoothie Station can “recognize” you, and already know how to prepare your preferred drink. Each smoothie costs between €3 and €3.5 (roughly $4.00 USD), and you can pay with your credit card, or through the accompanying mobile app.

Additionally, Alberts gives users the options of connecting their calendars to its system, so the Smoothie Stations will know if you just exercised and can ping you with a suggestion for a thirst-quenching blend. Mathijssen said the company is looking at additional ways of connecting Smoothie Stations with devices like your phone or FitBit to automatically know who you are, and any activity you might have partaken in, but there are privacy considerations to address (GDPR, anyone?).

Hello! We're Alberts from Alberts Smoothie Station - Intro Video - Smoothie Machine Made in Belgium

While Alberts makes smoothies, it is solely in the machine renting business. Their customers are existing food locations, like supermarkets or catering companies, who already have their own frozen food suppliers to keep each Smoothie Station stocked. The machines are self-cleaning, and only require someone on-site to make sure they don’t run out of any ingredients and address any maintenance issues. Each unit costs a location €495 a month, and Alberts gets a small percentage of every transaction.

Based in Brussels, Alberts has raised €675,000 (~$836,000), and has started looking for its Series A round. Right now, there are five Alberts Smoothie Stations around Brussels, with another five planned for release in Brussels and Antwerp. Mathijssen said that he is also fielding calls from “more than 50 countries” about potential franchise opportunities.

Alberts isn’t alone in rolling out robot smoothie servers. Just a few weeks ago, 6d bytes debuted its Blendid robot smoothie maker. However, Blendid is a larger installation and is more robot-like with its swiveling arm that prepares your smoothies.

If these automated smoothie-robots take off, and can whip up delicious drinks around the clock with a small footprint and no personnel, the days of Jamba Juice (as we know it) are numbered. It doesn’t take an Einstein to see that.

Restaurant Robots Starting to Fill in for Fatigued Staff

Often, when we talk about robots in the food industry, there is a measure of doom and gloom associated with it. I’m guilty of this as well, trying to balance excitement around innovation with the gravitas of millions of human jobs being wiped out.

But it’s also important to remember that robots are really frickin’ cool, and as a CNBC story points out, robots are needed in a country like Japan, which is facing a labor shortages due to a shrinking population.

Tetsuya Sawanobobori started up a restaurant upon completion of grad school. Long story short: long hours made it exhausting and he quit after a year. For sure, owning a restaurant is challenging, but Sawanobori talked to CNBC about the food service industry in Japan more generally, saying “Right now, especially in the food service industry, they have a serious lack of labor because people tend to avoid these kinds of jobs, doing daily, repetitive tasks.”

After exiting the restaurant business, Sawanobori got into robotics and is now the president of Connected Robotics. The company will start selling a robot this summer that can prepare Takoyaki, a Japanese street food consisting of batter balls and minced octopus. Sawanobori said that his robot will take the pressure off of cooking staff who won’t have to stand in front of a hot grill all day.

Takoyaki Robot Demo @Maker Faire Tokyo 2017

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this story coming out of Japan. At our own Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase last year, Hirofumi Mori told our audience that his time performing repetitive, manual tasks at a crêpe shop inspired him to invent his own crêpe making robot.

Here in the U.S., the long hours of restaurant work are spurring our own robot adoption. Bear Robotics created “Penny,” a robot that looks like a bowling pin and shuttles food and dirty dishes around the restaurant. Bear CEO John Ha told us that he built Penny because “[Servers] are tired, they get a low salary, usually no health insurance, but they’re working really hard.”

Sometimes, however, it seems like our new restaurant robots are working too hard. The most famous example of this is Miso Robotics’ Flippy, the burger flipping robot. Flippy was temporarily “retired” after its first official day on the job, but evidently that’s because it was too fast and the human co-workers couldn’t keep up.

Perhaps the possible Little Caeser’s pizza making robot will fare better.

With the restaurant robot genie out of the bottle, now it’s incumbent upon us a society to keep up, and avoid the doom and gloom.

Food Industry a Big Buyer as Robot Orders Rose to Record Levels

We’ve known for a while that the robots are coming, but now we have some hard numbers detailing just how many of them there are. According to recent data from the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), 2017 was a record-setting year for robots, with the food industry among the big buyers (hat tip to ZDNet).

According to the A3, during the first nine months of 2017, there were 27,294 orders of robots, valued at roughly $1.473 billion in North America. This is a 14 percent jump in units and a 10 percent rise in dollars over the same period in 2016.

Among those industries ponying up for robots were Metals (54 percent), Automotive Components (42 percent) and Food and Consumer Goods (21 percent).

“Food and Consumer Goods” is a pretty broad category, but we are seeing robots deployed throughout the food chain. From tending crops, to re-stocking grocery shelves, to delivering groceries and flipping burgers.

Don’t expect this growth to slow down in the coming year. Robots work really well for manual, repetitive tasks and giants like Walmart and Amazon really like them. Additionally, the restaurant industry already predicts that robots will become mainstream by 2025.

If the GOP tax bill becomes law (which looks likely), corporations will have more money to spend and there’s a good chance that will go towards more robots and automation. With all that, 2017’s record year for robots could seem paltry in 2018.

Bosch’s Friendly Kitchen Robot Shows Off Sous Chef Skills At IFA 2017

When Bosch showed off their kitchen assistant Mykie at last year’s IFA and a few months later at CES, the social robot did little more than project a looped video suggesting how he might help out in the kitchen.

But at this year’s IFA, the little guy seemed all grown up as he showed off a voice-powered interactive demo of guided cooking. In the video captured below, you can see the user giving voice commands to navigate Mykie from step to step, watch recipe preparation instructions, search the web and watch videos of pro cooks preparing the food.

It’s an interesting evolution of Mykie in what is fast becoming a more competitive market for AI powered sous chefs. This year we’ve seen everyone from Buzzfeed Tasty to Whirlpool join others like the Hestan Cue and Cuciniale with guided cooking platforms, while Amazon and Samsung are creating what are voice-powered kitchen computers as extensions of their existing AI and app platforms.

By giving Mykie a name and cute little robot face, Bosch is betting consumers will embrace AI assistants with a little personality. Compared with the faceless Alexa, Mykie certainly seems warmer and one that might even become something of a “friend” in the kitchen. Of course, whether we as consumers will befriend the likes of Mykie is part of a longer-term question around just how realistic home robots and AI assistants become.

Bosch representatives at IFA were still vague on when we might see Mykie make it to market. With CES in just a few months, you have to wonder if the German appliance giant will reveal details in Las Vegas about when consumers might have their own kitchen assistant with a friendly face to help them make dinner.

Smart Kitchen Startup Else Labs Raises $1.8 Million

While no one has quite figured out what the robot cook of the future looks like, it’s not for lack of trying.

While some labor to create a fully functional transformer-meets-home-chef like Moley, others see a path filled with single-function robots spitting out tortillas and mixing drinks.

And then there’s Else Labs, which sees a future for cooking automation that fuses timeworn cooking concepts like a slow cooker with modern advances such as a smart dispenser system and app control.

Else founder Khalid Aboujassoum first presented the concept for his automated cooker on Stars of Science, a Qatar TV show similar to Shark Tank. At the time, he only had a rough working prototype of the product that would eventually come to be known as Oliver, but he received enough encouragement to start working with a San Francisco design firm and keep on developing the product.

Illustration of a user preparing food for the Oliver cooking chambers. Source: Else Labs

After participating in last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit’s Startup Showcase, the team continued to work on Oliver’s development. They created another early prototype and started doing one-on-one cooking sessions with consumers in their homes to refine the experience. And now, with the company’s goal of bringing the product to market in spring of 2018, they have raised a seed round of $1.8 million.

I emailed Aboujassoum to ask him a few questions about the funding and the company’s product:

Wolf: Who were your investors?

Aboujassoum: Yellow Services, a wholly owned subsidiary by Qatar Development Bank, is the institutional investor. YS manages a $100M fund dedicated to innovation startups and SMEs that can contribute in diversifying Qatar’s economy.

Wolf: How much total has Else Labs raised?

Aboujassoum: $1.95 million. (ed note: The company raised an angel round of approximately $150 thousand)

Wolf: Where is Oliver in terms of development and expected ship date? 

Aboujassoum: We have an advanced working prototype that we are using to conduct 1-to-1 sessions with early adopters in their homes. Those sessions are helping us in refining the user experience and prepare for the pilot program that we are working on launching soon.

The pilot will inform our crowd-funding and overall launch strategy. Our target launch date is Q2 2018.

Wolf: Who are the key members of your team?

Aboujassoum: myself (ed note:Aboujassoum is founder & CEO), Tariq Maksoud (cofounder & lead mechanical engineer, and Abdulrahman Saleh Khamis (cofounder & lead electrical engineer).

Wolf: There hasn’t been a successful product in the robotic/automated cooking category yet. Why will Oliver be different?

Aboujassoum: We believe that the main reason it’s been difficult to crack the market is because the cost has been too high or the product has been simply too intimidating or different from what a user is accustomed to in a kitchen appliance.

We were determined to keep lasersharp focus on engineering Oliver to be cost effective and enhancing what is already familiar to the user in what to expect from a kitchen appliance. With Oliver, we were able to build the necessary functions of automated dispensing, mixing, and heating that meets its futuristic robotic function, but yet familiar in its form to the user.

Finding the balance between performance, form, and cost was a challenge that we were able to overcome with the technology we have developed. Overcoming this challenge was the key to opening the door to designing a user centred product in this space. This is what makes Oliver different.

We know that we still have a long way ahead of us, but we believe Oliver is the perfect balance that will be inviting to users in and will bridge that gap between traditional kitchen appliances and the future of cooking.

Else Labs was one of 15 startups selected for the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase. To find the next big thing in cooking, you won’t want to miss the Startup Showcase at this year’s Smart Kitchen Summit. Use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of any ticket.

Can This Self-Driving Car Pioneer Crack The Code On Cooking Robots?

The home cooking robot market is, shall we say, in the early innings.

Not that folks aren’t trying. Companies like Sereneti and GammaChef are working on creating full home cooking robots, while others like Rotimatic and Bartesian are applying robotics more narrowly to tackle single-function machines to make flatbread or cocktails.

But it’s pretty self-evident at this point we’ve only just thrown out the first pitch.

So when the father of the self-driving car puts out a feeler for a new project he’s working on in the area of home cooking robotics, needless to say it piqued my interest.

According to Business Insider, Sebastian Thrun, the man behind early autonomous car effort Stanley, is building a team for a project that will develop “technology to modernize how we prepare daily healthy and tasty meals at home.” The company’s stealth name is SVFactory.

Thrun’s entry into this market is exciting if for only his proven ability jumpstart new industries through innovation. Not only did his work at DARPA eventually lead to his shepherding Google’s early work on autonomous vehicles, but Thrun also went on to found Google’s so-called ‘moonshot factory’, Google X, and has been instrumental in helping to democratize the education market through the founding of Udacity, a hugely popular online learning site.

But while Thrun clearly has an ability to make futuristic technology concepts more market ready, he has his work cut out for him with consumer cooking robots. It remains to be seen how robotics can be applied to home cooking in a way that makes consumers feel, well, at home. Futuristic efforts like that of Moley are intriguing, but I’m not entirely sure how mass market and practical putting two giant robots arms would be in a normal home.

Still, count me as excited about the entrance of a heavy hitter like Thrun into the market. Let’s hope he can hit a home run or two.