The recently launched E Vino Spaghetti restaurant in Tokyo is not your typical dining place. When you go inside their kitchen, you'll find that they don't have a chef (technically not a human chef). Instead, you'll find an AI-powered robot cooking your orders!
Japanese giant Yaskawa Electric's industrial robot Motoman turns over an "okonomiyaki."
The robotics company TechMagic and the Japanese café operator Pronto Corporation jointly created the AI-chef, which can not simply boil water and prepare pasta but also clean up after cooking.
Faster Than Fast Food
As reported first by Food & Wine, the robotic chef is called "P-Robo." It is equipped with four pans at its disposal, allowing it to rapidly prepare and cook pasta dishes to serve its customers on time!
The P in P-Robo stands for "Pronto," and it is faster than fast food as it can easily produce an astounding 90 meals per hour when it is operating at full capacity.
The robotic chef starts with frozen pasta, defrosting each serving in just 10 seconds, and heats the food while preparing the sauces. The first dish only takes 75 seconds to prepare, and each consecutive dish can be served in just 45 seconds - which truly makes P-Robo a mad multi-tasking machine!
He added that in the field of self-driving cars, the United States and China dominate this industry, but Japan prides itself on leading "the world of cooking robots" by fusing its industrial and culinary traditions.
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Is The Restaurant Fully Automated?
The robot has been relentlessly working in the kitchen of E Vino Spaghetti for four years and is currently a fourth-generation version. The restaurant isn't entirely automated, although Japan Today reports that it was developed in part to address challenges of human resource development in the culinary industry.
Food & Wine noted that the pasta must still be plated, topped with any desired garnishes, and delivered to the diner by P-human Robo's human coworkers. There are other menu items, such as salads, that must still be put together by hand and other traditional methods.
When Business Insider Japan attended a sampling party, there were a few technical glitches on the AI-powered chef, but Pronto has since explained that maintenance staff would be positioned in the restaurant for the time being to keep a close eye if the robo-chef would be glitching again.
According to Pronto, they want to provide P-Robos to other restaurant chains and place P-Robos in as many as 50 restaurants over the course of the next five years. This aligns with TechMagic's overarching strategy for deploying its robots to address issues relevant to restaurants.
The company wrote on its website that 60 to 70 percent of a restaurant's costs are often related to labor and supplies. In the same manner, Tech Magic claims that restaurants with low-profit margins are likely to halt due to rising labor and food expenses. Hence, they want to address these problems through their technologies.
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This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Joaquin Victor Tacla
