LeverLongEnough t1_ir5sjgo wrote on October 5, 2022 at 3:28 PM

It’s interesting how many challenges this “easy” process still sees as it’s being designed. Quoted in the article, 30 former SpaceX engineers still find this work challenging.

To me this means probably what we already know; automation/robotics etc will favor the big players with lots of capital, and if you’re small your use-case needs to be narrow or laser-focused on one market/technology/process.

Especially for food automation it’s hard to completely remove human involvement, like for cleaning and managing restock of the machines. Still obviously major efficiency gains though.

One company I know of that wasn’t mentioned in the article is called Piestro, which is developing a pizza-making vending machine - the idea being that a pizza place could have their main restaurant and then operate a few satellite vending machines to service on a daily or almost daily basis.

CthuluTheGrand t1_ir698ds wrote on October 5, 2022 at 5:15 PM

Probably very difficult to automate because cooking is so full of variables. Ingredients, even by the same brand, can differ massively. Like flour, eggs, yeast and the like can be quite different. Then specifically when it comes to baking the room temperature can affect the outcome a lot. Assume it's very hard to make the robot assess the probable outcome during the process to sufficiently tweak it enough to make the end product come out great. If a human pizza-baker starts pulling at the dough and notice that it's not as supple as it should be then heshe will tweak their handling of it or process it further. For a robot that would be quite difficult, not impossible but difficult.

n0oo7 t1_ir6u7z5 wrote on October 5, 2022 at 7:29 PM

If we have a machine that can see green vs red tomatoes and kick the greens one out We can have a machine that can see how done a pizza is.

Downwhen t1_ir5xhod wrote on October 5, 2022 at 4:00 PM

Yeah I was this close to investing a couple thousand into Piestro during their last crowdfunding round... I didn't pull the trigger though, will be interesting to see how far they go

MasonJack12 t1_ir8bomj wrote on October 6, 2022 at 2:01 AM

I was going to comment the same thing. My big concern is maintenance and repairs. I owned a pizza truck with a mechanic impingement oven and those things were expensive to fix and it was hard to find qualified techs. Can only imagine what it will be like if a kiosk goes down thats new and proprietary.