Nusret36x: The big idea for Robotic Sous Chefs
Designing Robotic Sous Chef for restaurants
For several years through my high school and undergrad studies I have been developing Robots as part of my interest and fascination ranging from Battle bots, Martial Rover Prototypes, Bionics, Robot that moves like a squirrel and the very popular robotic manipulator arms. By being immersed in this sector I have come to realize that the 21st century is the age of Collaborative Robots or Cobots as we generally call it. We might not have seen them around us as much because most of them are being deployed inside large industries, or space projects or OT’s for tele surgeries but they surely are assisting us, humans, with our jobs.
Now, what makes Cobots fascinating?… Well, the fact that they can talk, listen, understand, and work around humans in an extremely safe and comfortable manner. In this blog, I will take you through the evolution and use of Cobots as chefs, yes, robots that work in kitchens. I will also walk through a few characteristics that I think make Cobots very useful and probably even better than humans at performing physical tasks. By the way- the idea of kitchen robots is not new. The 1989’s Back To The Future 2 featured Master-Cook, a robot with a screen and two arms for helping to cook.
So how does a Cobot Sous Chef look like? If you imagine human arm like looking two machine hands that chop-chop-chop and saute-saute-saute; you are definitely right, but these are very high-fi and are designed for deluxe domestic home use, the best one I’ve seen is being developed by Moley Robotics. But this blog is intended to show you the kind of Robotic Chefs that can cook in large restaurants. They might not quite look exactly like two human hands but their functions are pretty much with the same distinction and agility, in fact, faster and can cover a larger workspace too.
Some of these robots I have seen are generally capable of a 6 D.O.F (degree of freedom) movement and have abilities limited to making just salads, or sandwiches and setting up your ice cream, one such example is Alfred by Dexai with whom I personally had a chance to interact with. But on the other hand, these types of Robots are suitable for doing fast, complex, and bulk tasks in large-sized restaurant kitchens, and sensing this very potential I thought of a few characteristics in a Robotic Sous that can rock it in a restaurant kitchen.
Let me introduce you to Nusret36x, named after the most celebrated chef Nusret Gokce (a.k.a SaltBae). Nusret36x is a robotic sous chef, it is inchoate in its prototype development yet, but I would like to express my design views as follows.
Useful Redundancy: Redundancy is generally avoided while designing robots, however, I feel that ‘useful’ redundancy features of Nusret36x make it capable of mimicking human chef like styles and methods of cooking. This feature also equips Nusret with the liberty to perform a task in several different ways; just like we humans do.
Usable Waist: Generally, robots and in this case even Robotic Chefs are serial link manipulators, this makes them immobile and limits its working agility and reachability i.e. it can cater to many kitchen tables. Nusret is designed to have a base that enables the complete robot to stir about multiple places on the restaurant floor quickly and precisely. This base is a parallel manipulator, and technically Nusret deems to be a Hybrid Serial-Parallel robot. This waist is thought to mimic the waist of a human chef and hence by inherence, we can understand the level of agility Nusret can demonstrate.
Minimum Singularities: Singularities in any robot are the areas of the workspace where the robot acts crazy or stuck. In simple language, a singularity is an area in the workspace where the robot cannot perform any task properly. Designing a minimum singularity Robot like Nusret36x is a tricky job, and it has a lot to do with the shape, sizing of the links and joints, and the configuration.
In my final opinion, a successful Robotic Sous chef is the one that can cook faster than a usual human chef ;I mean that’s why we invented robots right? -while adding a personalized touch to its taste, just like a human chef.
Exploring possibilities with popular technologies like IoT and Voice technology to leverage the wonders Robotic Sous Chefs can pull, I am conceptualizing a restaurant situation where Alexa takes your orders and communicates with Nusret while it cooks for you. This also allows the customer to describe specifics in flavor, the quantity of ingredients, etc. Wouldn’t it be a classic experience? Let me know in the comments.
