First autonomous, AI-powered restaurant
abc7.com
abc7.com
1. They mention the fry tending robot (Flippy) costs $4,000 which seems quite off to me. It seems to be an off the shelf robot arm (Kuka?) attached to a gantry system. These components would cost at least $20,000 and probably much more. Maybe the quoted cost is the price per month to rent one of these systems as a customer. This would be in the right ballpark compared to the cost of hiring minimum wage human labor for a month.
2. I'm not sure it makes sense to use a robot arm to just tend fries because a custom designed machine could probably do it more economically. But even a custom machine may not be as economical as a human, who can tend the fries but also accomplish other tasks simultaneously. At my local McDonald's, the employees that bag orders also tend the fries.
On the other hand, if the robot arm can replace other machines and humans as well, it could justify the cost of the robot arm many times over. Miso's original idea incorporated a autonomous burger flipping capability, hence the name "Flippy" for their robot. From the video, they have since migrated to a mechanical rotating grill. Then I assume the burger flipping was too difficult to do with Flippy and they may be running up against the "hard" part of hard tech.
3. There is an unofficial subreddit following this company, /r/misorobotics, due to their heavy usage of crowd funding. Through the subreddit, I learned that Flippy has been deployed at about 20 White Castle locations, with plans to deploy to over 100 locations. I'm curious to see how this plan works out, given the previous point. If the total system cost is about $100,000, this would be a $10,000,000 expenditure for what amounts to a quality of life improvement for the current staff.
4. The location for this new restaurant is the previous Miso headquarters. I believe that it is operated by Miso, so this restaurant may function as a marketing vehicle more than an existence proof for the economic viability Miso's business.
Not to be cynical, but I doubt White Castle are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. The $100k per restaurant likely saves them having to hire and train and retain and provide health benefits to an employee. If a human employee costs them $50/hr all in (pay/health insurance/bennies/HR & payroll overhead), and the human employee works 40hrs/wk and 50wks/yr, the robot pays for itself in just a year. Not to mention that ideally the robot is more consistent and takes less time off and doesn't call in sick with a hangover.
My issue is with leaving a tip for robots! (hopefully less staff means more tips for each of them?)
This is some future shit. Whether we want it or not, eventually some subset of cooks will be replaced by robots. Look at Amazon trying to replace staff with robots. Next it will be McDonalds, which has the capital to invest in this tech. Their workflows are already extremely optimized.
In the future we'll be buying $6+ McDoubles where very few humans had a hand in its production.
It was driven by a really long RS232 cable from a computer in the back, and the random behavior coincided with starting some motor...
It seemed like it would be an easy fix-- toss in RS-485 converters, or change the communication protocol to be robust to corruption-- but instead it ended up disabled most of the time when it would clog itself up with bogus dispenses. I believe it was regarded as a failure.