Hacker News Reader

Comment by sorenn111 | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised Moley (http://www.moley.com/) didn't get a mention. I'm super excited about robotic food preparation, especially in the case of consumer facing robotics where its a unit in your own kitchen.

With that said, from the robotics progress I've seen/studied, more fundamental robotics progress needs to be made first. The approaches used right now are just not durable/reliable enough for mass market adoption. Best of luck to that team though.

View on HN

Moley looks like a science fiction pipe dream right now and would require an absolutely massive number of leaps in modern robotics - control, vision, whatever. We're a long way off such a system.

Putting junk in a bowl is a much simpler feat. Also hard for robotics to win much on I should think because the labor for putting food into a bowl is not terribly expensive as is (and imo not a particularly exciting market) - see Eatsa. Though it's still cool that they end-to-end the process with dishwashing (according to video).

This seems convoluted to me. Like using an android to operate a manual spinning wheel, instead of an automated spinning machine.

The price of $15k according their YouTube video is ridiculously low. Decent robot arm costs you $5k alone. Not sure how they will plan to make some profit even buying parts in bulk.

$5k is on the low end. The demo kitchen they did was with 2 UR5 robots, list price somewhere around $20k each. They put 2 5 finger hands on the end, which probably cost at least the same again each. I'd bet you'd be getting well towards $75k (or maybe even significantly more) just buying the components.

In response to this (and the price mentioned in sibling comments of $15k+), I recently heard about Tovala [1] which seems like a good alternative. It doesn't appear to be as complex, but I don't think robotic cooking has to be.

[1] https://www.tovala.com

I had something like this delivered frozen to the fridge in the office. It was huge fridge just for this purpose. But the meals weren’t enjoyable. Price was 3-6€/meal, so Tovala goes premium. I ended preparing everything at home. If I were mega rich, I would love to have big robot in the kitchen cooking the way I do.

Just throwing out some armchair criticism: I would think that a robotic chef would look a little less intuitive. I mean, is two monkey arms really the optimal strategy for revolutionizing this field? Happy to be proven wrong!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com