Robot-Powered Pizza, Anyone? How Automation Is Transforming The Fast-Food Industry
Robot-Powered
Pizza, Anyone? How Automation Is Transforming The Fast-Food Industry
Apr 12, 2019, 12:23am
Can
the restaurant industry really be automated? You may have heard about Flippy, a robot that
can flip burgers or Makr Shakr, a robotic bar system. While
certainly far from full domination, artificial intelligence and robots are
making headlines for the possibilities they offer for the food industry. Pizza
companies are some of the most advanced innovators when it comes to figuring
out how to automate their businesses.
At Zume Pizza,
a Mountain View, California (Bay Area) enterprise founded in 2015, humans might
do all the prep work for the ingredients, but then the robots take over
repetitive and potentially dangerous tasks. When a customer places an order
from Zume’s app, Doughbot starts preparing their specific order by turning a
dough ball into a pizza crust in a mere 9 seconds. Robots Giorgio and Pepe take
over from there by applying the sauce to the crust and pass the pie on to
Marta, a robot who spreads the sauce to the corners of the crust. Humans step back
in to put the toppings on, a task that is challenging to automate due to the
different textures and sizes toppings come in. Then robots Bruno and Vincenzo
put the pies in and out of the oven respectively. Customers get to enjoy a
freshly made 14-inch pizza that costs between $10 and $20 with no need to tip.
Zume is also changing
pizza delivery with its “Baked on the Way” technology. Delivery
trucks with all the pizza fixings and outfitted with six ovens allow the
company to make 120 pizzas per hour—baking when en route to a customer's door.
The company collects data and uses predictive analytics that helps determine
what day and time people are most apt to order pizza. They are then able to
stock the delivery trucks with the types of pizza that are expected to be
ordered and deploy them to the neighborhood so they are in position to respond
quickly when an order comes in. Zume plans to expand by scaling its proprietary
technology platform that includes logistics, infrastructure, and operations to
help others in the food industry introduce similar automation to their
operations.
While not yet delivering to a neighborhood near you,
Domino’s anticipates that its autonomous delivery vehicle DRU will
be the future of pizza delivery. Although the company has experimented with
delivering pies from the skies in drones, delivery by DRU has a lot fewer
hurdles to overcome such as not needing to deal with regulatory approval from
the FAA.
The autonomous machine developed by Starship
Technologies rolls down the sidewalk at around 4 mph with its
cargo (about 4 to 5 medium pizzas). DRU navigates from a starting point to the
delivery destination using onboard sensors, cameras and high-res maps of its
territory. Crossing streets or curbs aren't a problem, but the bot can't climb
stairs or go into buildings. Customers in the test area can watch the robot's
progress as its delivering their pizza via their phone and use a code that was
delivered to their phone to unlock the cargo area to retrieve their pie. Once
the bot returns to its home base, its battery will be swapped out for a freshly
charged one, so it can begin another mission.
In addition to Domino’s test,
Starship Technologies has tested its
autonomous delivery vehicles in 20 countries since 2015. As the next
phase of testing, they launched on the Intuit campus in Mountain View, Calif.
Employees of the company can order breakfast, lunch or coffee from the staff
cafeteria and have it delivered to them via the robot. This rollout will bring
the delivery robots in contact with more people so more improvements can be
made before full-scale rollout in a city.
Robots vs. Restaurant Professionals
As restaurant robots take over tasks from chefs,
bartenders, servers and delivery drivers, what’s in store for the humans they
are replacing?
“Automation exists to improve the quality of human
lives,” Zume CEO Alex
Garden was quoted. He added, “We believe we should be leveraging
automation to automate boring, dangerous, repetitive work.”
The restaurant industry is actually experiencing its lowest
unemployment rates on record at 6% causing a University of
Michigan labor economist to say we should be seeing high unemployment in the
industry if businesses were just using machines to replace workers. As with
other industries, the hope for automation is that people are freed up to do
higher-value work while robots are there to do the repetitive and dangerous
work. It is expected the jobs of restaurant workers will change with the
introduction of automation, but so far there’s no robot that can replace human
interaction—yet.
Comments
Post a Comment