This robot serves up 340 hamburgers per hour

Does anyone here have experience with fast food enterprises? It would be interesting to hear about how this sort of machine could affect companies like McDonalds and whether or not it's <i>the future</i> or just a cute idea that won't scale?<p>I have the feeling that, if this sort of idea was as value as the article implies, McDonalds (or Burger King, or any other big chain) would have put serious money into developing this sort of thing and it would already be everywhere.<p>(I wish there was a website or publication that took businesses and profiled how they work, the challenges they face and the costs associated with parts of the business consumers might not understand, so these sort of questions were easy to answer. I would love to read how McDonalds works (as a business))

When I met the Momentum Machine guys here in San Francisco, I was shocked that they were planning to open a restaurant chain instead of licensing the technology out to existing players. Opening restaurants? Making food? Very un-startupy, right?<p>But it turns out that if anyone can do it, these guys can. The brick-and-mortar restaurant business is massive, bigger than many technology sectors, and prime for disruption with new food and models: there's a $184 billion global fast food market, a $2.1 trillion global market, and just about everybody needs to eat.<p>This has the potential elements of greatness: serious, hardcore mechanical engineers as founders, with a background in the restaurant industry. More power to John and Alex -- can't wait to try my first one.

The big issue with robot cooks isn't a machine that can cook food...those have been around for some time now. The real question is can the robots cook safe and healthful food <i>with no human assistance</i>? Any Board of Health will agree that the real challenge in cooking isn't the mechanical combination of the ingredients, it's inspecting the food and noticing potential problems that will stand out to any person.<p>Robots that can cook on their own have enormous benefits to society. The preparation of the food is made slightly cheaper and overall quality of the food improves (if a robot can make the perfect burger once, it can do it again and again). There's no need to worry about washed hands or cooks with colds, and for simple or repeat orders it's usually easier to interface with a machine instead of a person. But the real benefit to the world is freeing up the processing power of human minds for something other than flipping meat every X minutes.<p>These machines take a lot of the human labor out of food preparation, but at least one person will still need to be around to answer certain questions: Did this meat go bad before it was cooked? Were there rat droppings on the grill? Is there any chance that someone could get sick by eating this? Of course these things will take breakthroughs in machine vision technology and herculean data collection efforts. But once we get there, we can really cut costs and fight hunger with food factories.

8 years ago i remember talking about how i wanted to do a fully automated pizza shop. with a atm like interface. i know nothing about the pizza business, and at the time labor was too cheap for pizzas to warrant building crazy complex machinery. now it could probably work, i think. I do wish there was a video of this hamburger machine in action.<p>EDIT: Apparently these machines exist for pizzas: <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/13/nation/la-na-nn-pizza-vending-machines-20120613" rel="nofollow">http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/13/nation/la-na-nn-pizz...</a>

This may seem like a bit of a brazen comment, but... <i>what about french fries</i>? A burger is boring, a burger and fries is a very American meal.<p>They point to elimination of tile floors, aprons, hair nets, and the like, but if the customer cannot get an order of fries from this robot, the restaurant will still have to have traditional kitchen infrastructure to make french fries.

No doubt this is the future of fast food. Been wondering for years why a big player like McDonalds wouldn't come out with such an automated process and came to the conclusion it must have something to do with the economic consequences this would bring along. The amount of minimum wage jobs this would destroy, would have a very devastating impact on the U.S. economy.

Here's what they need to do to create an automated restaurant...<p>Combine:<p>- Their invention, the robot burger maker<p>- iPads at every table to order (payment via stripe or similar service) : <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-01/may-the-tablet-take-your-order" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-01/may-the-tabl...</a><p>- Robot waiter : <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/business/tech/slideshow/Robots-work-restaurant-in-China-55341.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.sfgate.com/business/tech/slideshow/Robots-work-re...</a><p>But you'd still need people for cleaning, maintenance &#38; troubleshooting.

One question I have is this: if we let robots produce our fast food, what guarantees of food hygiene do we have? I imagine it can be pretty difficult to get a robot to self-clean all of the relevant parts, and it's not hard to imagine critters getting inside and making a nice home for themselves.<p>The picture in the article does nothing to convince me that a burger produced by this machine will not give me food poisoning.

I worked in fast food growing up and it seems hard to imagine a machine would be a huge cost saver because the actual burger production was rarely a problem.<p>Most of the work is in the pre-prep, cleaning, stocking in preparation for the lunch rush. The machine would be nice during a rush but I have a hard time seeing it actually replacing an employee unless the robot also knows how to use a mop.

This thing sounds almost purpose-built to enable a gourmet burger food truck business -- a restaurant niche where revenue is largely tied to how quickly a <i>fixed</i> number of staff can churn out food.<p>There's also plenty of inherent down time for that same small staff, technical entrepreneur or centralized maintenance crew, to clean/maintain the machines.<p>One could set up a 'fleet' of such trucks and a centralized 'headquarters' with cleaning, stocking, and technical staff to handle any necessary maintenance and repair, as well as centralized and scalable data-driven inventory management and routing.

So long as the first restaurant is called Cafe Alpha and is staffed by an overenthusiastic female android, I'm happy.<p>(Go read Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou to get the joke ;)

I saw this machine in action at an event at the hardware accelerator they're part of. The guys behind it are cool and they have solved a number of problems so far.<p>But I do not think they have solved all of them. When I saw it the rate of production was far below 340/hr, and the machine wasn't doing all of the assembly. So I think the headline's use of the present tense is very misleading.

The machine may automate the slicing, cooking, and stacking, but cleaning seems like a major concern. The chutes with vegetables, cooking surfaces, and especially the meat grinders would all need close attention on an daily (or even hourly) basis.

What Americans really need right now is the ability to eat burgers faster and cheaper...<p><a href="http://singularityhub.com/2011/07/19/fat-america-keeps-getting-fatter/" rel="nofollow">http://singularityhub.com/2011/07/19/fat-america-keeps-getti...</a><p>Duh.

I have always wanted one of these sushi robots: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&#38;v=QPPwXRZCqew" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&#38;v=Q...</a>

The technology here could easily have been done 50-70 years ago (And it probably was)<p>I think it's not about robots but the spread of ideas and commerce is now much easier with the internet.

Am I the only one looking at the image and imagining chain grease flicking onto the burgers... Yuck.<p>Afterthought: I suppose that might be better than humans handling my food.

I almost feel bad for all the people without education. Robots are killing their jobs, one niche at a time.