These things really suck. The novelty wears off instantly. It's uncomfortable having to either stand up to get something from the robot or awkwardly reach over while sitting down. The moment when food comes out is the most likely time for customers to express positive emotion at a restaurant. You don't get to express gratitude toward human staff and the staff don't receive that positive feedback. The people working there are relegated entirely to cleanup and maintenance.<p>But I guess the robot companies are making money.
Local bowling alley has them. The wife ordered some stuff just to see it come by and wink at her.<p>They still ask for a tip. Guess the robots gotta feed their electric sheep.
I heard it's really difficult to measure the success of these rollouts because the cat-eared robots put the food on the table and then push it off.
Pretty sure those are Chinese robots though:<p><a href="https://www.pudurobotics.com/en" rel="nofollow">https://www.pudurobotics.com/en</a>
A Vietnamese restaurant near Seattle has one of these and they are both annoying and useless. The device rolls slowing between the tables playing a repetitive tune like a popsicle truck. Meanwhile the server walks along next to it and pull the food off the tray and puts it on the table. There is no labor saving or time saving benefit. I suspect that they do it just to seem “high tech” but its not impressive.
if you are interested in this robot, this is off the shelf product called BellaBot<p>fun fact Carrefour Poland decided to make it their mascot: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerfu%C5%9B" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerfu%C5%9B</a><p>they even sell this catface t-shirts and other wardrobe<p>the robot itself from technological point of view looks kind off like oversized robot vacuum, but looks interesting anyways
Just got served by a similar thing to these today in Amsterdam at a trendy seafood place. I thought I wouldn't like it but it was fine. Just get the plate and click the screen "Done". Smooth and no talking to anyone. Pretty nice.
This is basically just a roomba with trays on it, right?<p>Are they being unloaded by the customers? The article gives the impression that it's just carrying the trays and a human waiter is unloading, which seems like just a very expensive cart.
I would like these if they had closed chambers that only open up when the robot arrives at the table.<p>I wouldn't want to eat food that was driven unprotected through the restaurant. Other customers might have dropped something onto it. Or have touched it while grabbing their own food from the robot.
I am in Portugal and have a Chinese-owned sushi place near me that uses one of these, as well as Android tablets with menus to order from the table. Not a high-end place at all.<p>I’ve noticed other similar restaurants using the same order system, but only a couple have robots.
They have these in CenterParcs in the UK. Bit of a novelty as a waiter still unloads the food and puts it on the table - the robot just brings it over.<p>I guess there is more time for waiters to actually serve customers rather than spending time going back and forwards a lot
As already said, those kind of robots are available at other places as well, so this article, albeit a bit more fancy, seems to look like one of those "Oh no! Look how wacky Japan is!" articles! :D