Eatsa has done a great job marketing itself as the automatic restaurant, so much so that many people believe robots prepare their food (their kitchen is just as labor intensive as any other restaurant). I actually spoke to their engineering director a while ago and I think they are going to have a hard time building any real robots (they are working on this and hired several engineers to do so). For starters, they had to outsource building their automatic cubbies - they couldn't build a moving door by themselves. But they are hoping to build an autonomous food preparation system more sophisticated and an order of magnitude cheaper than anything that exists today.

Something I see a lot is for someone with a lot of experience in pure software engineering to delve into hardware or robotics, and think he'll be able to just breeze through it (if it were so easy, there would be a lot more awesome consumer robots everywhere). What I found particularly amusing was the way he viewed it though. When I said robots are limited by the laws of physics, his counterpoint was that software was limited by the speed of light. He was dead serious, and to him that made the challenges comparable.

I look forward to seeing all the crazy food robots people concoct in the coming years. I suspect most people will realize it's a lot harder than they thought, and by the time the robot is useful it's too expensive to be profitable. Most people are unaware of the many companies in past decades that have tried and failed, including some that actually launched a product. This is definitely my favorite - an automatic hamburger restaurant from the 60's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE