In every restaurant kitchen there is a silent battlefield where no one wants to be, the sink, mountains of plates full of grease, slippery glasses, lost cutlery, trays with leftover food, everything accumulating at a pace that never stops and it was precisely there where a San Francisco company decided to attack first, creating a robot capable of doing the most hated job in the kitchen day and night without rest.
Armstrong Robotics realized that other companies were trying to fry burgers or flip potatoes and they created a system with three robotic arms with 7 degrees of freedom each, equipped with a parallel claw designed specifically to deal with the real chaos of a kitchen.
The central problem was the perception of all the objects in a kitchen, shiny dishes, transparent glasses, grease, butter, dried remains, none of that works well with traditional sensors, Armstrong Robotics tried to use humanoid hands, but the cost and fragility made that path impractical.
The solution was to create interchangeable fingers, each specialized in a task. One to separate stacks of slippery plates, another to pick up cups sideways, another for cutlery. The robot changes fingers on its own as it analyzes what is in front of it. At first, Armstrong Robotics needed to keep its own employees inside the restaurants to monitor everything. Today that is no longer necessary.
The new system operates completely on its own 24 hours a day with a warning screen that guides restaurant staff when a tile is missing or a minor problem arises and the installation is so discreet that restaurants do not have to close for even a minute.
You are ready to live with millions of robots of all kinds, in my opinion, everything indicates that this is going to happen.
