Of course, this won't be how food is prepared by robots ultimately. Each step will more likely be performed by small robots optimized for the task.
Food will also probably be driven from place to place by robotic vehicles. You might have one company making noodles and sending them to other companies five minutes away that incorporate them into a dish or other product.
Virtual supply chains will eliminate a lot of capital cost of setting up a restaurant and reduce the delays that destroy freshness and necessitate preservatives. Like fabless semiconductor companies, there might be prepless restaurants.
Another company may just do all the selection and slicing of your vegetables for you. They may be picked overnight at their peak and delivered to you so you can throw them in your omelet. The slicing might even happen on the trip to you.
I can see you selecting a recipe and a web app that prices and source all the ingredients for you. If you love to cook but don't enjoy finding or prepping some or all of the ingredients, such arrangements could help you save money and get better results.
Quite a few people eat the cheapest and most convenient foods they can find. But in the future, healthy food will be cheaper, fresher and will find you, hopefully making crap truly uncompetitive.
Your assuming a vary high density food distribution network. Most restaurants in the US are in fairly low density areas. So while food is often prepared offsite, the shipping delays result in preservation issues.
He also assumes cheap transportation of goods. Economics & business is poised to change as we know it when oil production starts flagging, if comparable alternatives are not found.
"Buying local" may one day no longer be the luxury option at the grocery store ;)
This might look like a good idea, but you need to include the energy costs from building all those tiny robots. Fixing them when they break down. Building a strong enough roof to hold them, 6 inches of topsoil and your crop. Irrigation and fertilizer and pesticides for that crop. Storage space for that crop for the better part of a year including some form of climate control to minimize spoilage etc etc.
Honestly, sectioning off the mid west and transporting the food to you by trains is actually a much better idea. You can still use robots but you get to use really big and cheap ones that do a simple job and get regular maintenance by people that know what their doing. You can also minimize the contamination from air pollution etc.
PS: Moving 2 weeks supply of food around the world by boat can easily take less energy than driving to a 5 miles to the super market to pick it up. If you want to be as environmentally friendly as possible, move to a big city and become a vegetarian. Living in the countryside feels more natural but it's much much worse for the planet.
Once robots are growing the food, a lot less of it will be imported. Even with the cost of maintenance, robots will be cheaper than human labor, eliminating a major reason for importing.
I guess if you think of robots as they are today, it may seem like they'd break down a lot. But agricultural robots will eventually be more like insects and, like many living things, cheaper to replace than repair.
I don't understand how a more eficient chain of supply and preparation will make healthier food cheaper. I was under the impression that generally lower quality goods are cheaper then higher quality ones, which in the case of food means healthier food. Could you explain your reasoning?
Lower quality foods are generally cheaper, but its not because cheapness leads to low quality. Its because these foods are cheaper and more convenient that we put with their low quality.
Things cost what they cost because of what's involved in producing them.
A lot of cheap food is cheap because its factory food. It can be grown and processed using machinery, which makes the labor involved per meal very low. Wheat, soy bean oil and corn syrup.
Most vegetables cannot be grown using machinery (yet), but robots that can tend a plant intelligently, that can select and pick vegetables at the right time and assemble them into a meal, will eliminate most of the labor involved.
I wonder, how long until we get the first completely automated fast food restaurant?
You walk in and download the menu over the wifi, pick what you want and pay with your card. You are then issued with a long unique code.
A machine prepares your meal and your phone prompts you to approach one of the vending areas. You then enter the code or scan an image and your food appears through a hole.
How many employees would be needed for serving > 100 per hour?
It's going to take about 40-50 years to reproduce what humans can do in a restaurant today with robots. More likely, the food preparation process will be altered to allow for easier automation. With the exception of a supervisor/engineer (that position won't be automated for at least another 100 years) - I think we'll see a fully automated fast food restaurant in about 20-25 years - though some elements of the restaurant business (Cleaning, French Fries, Order taking) - will likely be automated sooner - there will be demonstration restaurants with 50% automation in about 10 years.
[note: And yes, I do realize that the above predictions will require radical advancements in automation that are not easy to predict - call me an optimist. :-) ]
I think that you're wrong and I will illustrate why. When I graduated from college I spent an evening with friends and we mused what we'd buy with our new paychecks. I wanted a brand new Mustang and indeed I purchased one. But one friend, the only computer major, said he wanted a computer.
This was pre-pc era and the one he wanted cost as much as a house. We teased him all night about how speedily he could balance his checkbook or play checkers. Finally he'd had enough, pounded the table and said with a red face in ten years you will all have a computer that sits on your desk.
Our only exposure at that time was to the IBM 360 mainframe the school had and that only made us laugh harder. Truth is he was right, every last one of us had a pc in ten years.
The computer industry moves faster than you think. A few years later I went to a local store to see one of the first laser printers for sale. This one was $10,000 and as a group of us looked at it with the proud sales guy. I said as soon as I could get one for under $1500 I'll buy it. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy and the salesmen said maybe in ten years it will happen. Actually I got an HP Laserjet in around three years for $1499 and still have it - somewhere.
I'd wager that most of us on HN will have a robot in our house in well under ten years. I can't wait;<).
The equivalent of "Moore's law" for robotics hasn't shown similar growth. Many things - memory, storage, screens, transistor density, networking (wired / wireless) have growth curves that far outstrip what we've been able to do with robotics - my predictions are optimistic and suggest some advances in the art that aren't an extension of current trends.
But robotics hasn't really gotten its consumer spotlight yet.
If we ignore robotic vacuum cleaners and toys. But there are some incredibly cool robotics applications.
What needs to happen is a "killer application" of a robot in workplace that will be transferable to home. Off the bat I believe that robotic cars (or autopilots as they will be known) will be first major application of robots that can be transplanted from corporate world into home use.
And I can easily see that in 10 years a lot of new cars will be 1. electric and 2. will have an autopilot option.
A Roomba can be had for the price of a few weeks' groceries.
Industrial assembly robots run about $60k, though deployment costs are over 3x that. Curiously, reprogramming a robot is considerably more expensive than the robot itself, according to one source.
If you have a well-defined, and reasonably attainable task, costs are likely predictable and possibly finite. If you've got a poorly defined and hard-to-reach goal, expenses will likely rise to meet resources.
One thing I'll comment on this is that I have a Roomba, love it, but it does require quite a bit of human care. About every three clean cycles (I have a one bedroom apartment) I have to take it apart, clean all the hair that gets stuck around the brushes + gears) and assemble it back together.
"It's going to take about 40-50 years to reproduce what humans can do in a restaurant today with robots."
I'm not so sure. Take a look at the machinery that produces packaged food now-- it's fairly impressive that every step is automated and human intervention is seldom involved. I don't see a technical reason an entire McDonald's couldn't be completely automated now. If you can analyze and quantify each step in the process, you can build a machine to perform each step.
Customers expect to give special orders (hold the pickles, hold the lettuce), but you can provide those options in a software interface. Customers expect handling of exceptional circumstances (the pie is too dry, please replace it), but McDonald's-style preparatory science can help prevent such things (e.g. instead of cooking 12 pies at once, the equipment could cook a pie every few minutes.) I think the biggest problem is customers expecting to give orders in spoken language, but we're having trouble cracking that nut with software (noise, dialects, etc.) Also, there's political backlash for having few (if any) employees.
What I think will happen is that we won't reproduce how humans work in an McDonalds, we'll design new packaging/delivery mechanisms so that robots can deliver a Big Mac without having to do things like lift the burger from the freezer to the counter to the heating ovens to the table and finishing in the microwave.
Also - I would far, far prefer to order my food from a decent touch screen - I suspect the accuracy would greatly increase. (One of the best inventions ever in the takeout was the video screen showing you what the order taker thought you had ordered)
Why would the robots need to recognize voice at all?
Simply have a text menu which could be translated into all major languages and let people pick from that using either their smartphones or wall mounted touch screens.
Simply have a text menu which could be translated into all major languages
My understanding is the cash registers at a lot of fast food chains currently use pictures/icons rather than text (and a lot of cashiers can't do simple math for making change if the machine doesn't calculate it for them or there was an error or you would like to change something after the drawer is open). I don't see why this wouldn't work for ordering, and no need to translate into "all major languages".
From a technical aspect, they don't need to. But that's what people expect. John Q Public wants what he wants regardless of what the techies think he wants.
I've never understood the fascination with voice control. It's clumsy, it's inaccurate, and honestly it's a bit embarrassing to use alone or in public. Yet, "everyone" seems to want it, despite the fact that spatial-sensor-based (e.g. motion sensors, Kinect, etc. -- note that I'm not talking about gestures, which have the same problems with ambiguity as voice) and tactile controls are much more efficient.
Reading this made me picture trying to drive a car by voice: "Turn left. Left. Further left. More! AHH! NOT SO MUCH!" Here voice control seems like a desire to avoid having to clearly specify your request. "Didn't the car KNOW where I wanted to go? Doesn't this spreadsheet KNOW what numbers I want? Doesn't this fast food menu KNOW what food I want? Maybe if I could just tell it..." I suspect that voice recognition will be popular in the future, but it will seem a lot less sexy if users are still required to clearly specify what they want.
You've got it exactly -- the more important thing, IMO, is systems "knowing" what you want, predicting your behavior, in a way that is completely effortless, transparent, and expected. I'm doing that now with my startup, using pre-scripted actions, but hope to see user-adaptive, learning systems (e.g. the Nest thermostat) find their way into everything.
Not so sure, people are used to buying allot of things without needing to use their voices.
When amazon launched I doubt that the fact people couldn't specify which books they wanted to buy via voice control was a major hurdle.
I think the next generation will view buying most things via some text or graphics based menu as nothing unusual at all.
You don't walk into book stores to ask employees for the book you want. You browse, look, read, and finally select a book. No interaction with humans required. (There's human interaction at the point-of-sale, but you still don't have to speak to checkout.) Of course, if they didn't have the book you wanted, you might have to speak to a human to get it ordered ... if they didn't have computer kiosks for you to use instead.
Moving this type of sale onto the internet was not a change. Moving the food service industry, where human interaction is expected, into an environment without human interaction goes against people's expectations and habits. Is such a change technically feasible? Yes. Is it practical? Yes. Profitable? Sure, if you can change people's expectations.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I don't even think it'll be a difficult change. I personally would prefer it. But the first chain of restaurants to offer automated food service (and I do believe it'll need to be a chain) has many psychological barriers to overcome, in its investors and its customers.
What parts of what humans do in restaurants would take that long for a computer to be able to do?
Of course I'm not talking about proper restaurants here,
I'm talking about somebody who creates a fast food joint based on what can be automated as easily as possible. If something requires a human to make then it doesn't go on the menu.
After all Mcdonalds was basically designed to emulate a factory from the era as much as possible and factory production processes have moved on substantially.
The supervisor role would basically be replaced by a technician, but since humans need allot more supervision than robots, if there was enough reliability and redundancy built in then instead of a full time manager these chains could simply rotate engineers interchangeably between sites (since they are all using the same equipment which does not have human quirks like loyalty).
20-25 years is a pretty short time frame, given there is nothing in robotics technology today that suggests we're close to doing this. I've seen sandwich making robots for six years - they never seen to get much better than the OP video.
I think you're overestimating how long it'll take until we have automated restaurants. I think we'll have deployment of several fast food places with automated drive thrus within ten years.
Though I expect it to be a touch screen coated with thick plastic that horribly obscures the actual menu. Like a shoddy ATM at a corner store.
Then again, I'm perpetually disappointed with the slow pace of advancement. I often expect too much.
I guarantee you that there will not be a fully automated fast food restaurant in 10 years, possible exception being a massively inefficient MIT Science project.
There is just no way to make it economical versus hiring humans for $10/hour in that time frame.
I think it will be more like the "self-checkout" stations we see already at grocery stores. Instead of 3-4 people cooking, and 2-3 people taking orders at the counter/drive through, it'll be a bunch of "robots" cooking the food, and a self-service ordering station, with one person that oversees the robots, and one person overseeing the registers. Unfortunately, you usually need a human being to handle exceptional situations whether it's the human beings making mistakes, or the food preparation going wrong.
I visit those Pizza Hut express stores and watch them make my pizza all the time. I don't see anything they do that couldn't be done by a fairly complex vending machine....
Actually, the original wasn't a bad example, because the Pizza Hut Express stores already cook pre-made pizzas by putting them on a slow conveyor that goes through a small oven. Okay, so they turn the cheese pizzas into pepperoni by putting peperoni slices on top, but I'm sure a vending machine could be made that does that much.
I think there is a somewhat unstoppable direction towards automation but it will probably be shaky and filled with potholes.
For example, its been interesting to see the consumer response to the self checkout stands in the big chain stores. Those self-checkout stations in their current form I would say are somewhat of a failure to encourage automation at least from a consumer's standpoint. I'm a techie and I actively avoid them. Why? I and the other people I'm waiting in line behind take forever because we are all slow in finding the bar codes on each product. Not only that, 1 out of 10 times something seemingly goes wrong with checking out a product - the product needs to be verified by a store manager, the product gets scanned twice, etc. which all usually end up taking longer than the regular checkout lines. Interestingly a few of the stores near me just recently removed their automated systems after having them for many years. (I'm actually hoping one day they slap RFIDs on everything and you can just push your basket through a scanner.)
But I think the risk with robots and automated systems is when things go wrong when interacting with an unpredictable human. Technically when things go wrong its usually user error but not through the consumer's eyes - to them its a stupid robot that keeps on throwing their sandwich on the ground and their response is usually to run back to the old reliable way.
I think that's really an implementation issue, rather then a problem with the idea. The current batch of self-checkout systems are very very fragile. It seems that instead of optimizing them for throughput/efficiency, they optimized them for detecting if you are trying to steal something. For example, something as simple as brushing the weight sensor will trigger an alert that takes 15-20s to go away. There's really no reason to do that unless you are worried about people stealing. In reality, checking the weight is a very poor way of detecting this (every system I've seen has an "I'm using my own bag" option that makes the alert go away.
These are actually very unoptimized from the UI point of view too. For example, most of the people have their own loyalty card they scan at the beginning. Why not track these, and adjust settings on the machine based on it? For example, I mute the volume whenever I start, that would be nice to keep track of. Defaulting to showing me a list food that I've purchased over my last few trips would make things go quicker instead of me having to dig through pages of items looking for common things.
I'm rather interested in the amazing amount of abstraction achieved between "get instructions from internet" and "grab this pot and do shit with it". Fantastic.
That said, when the bread didn't go in the toaster for a second time I was half hoping it would start beating it until the toaster was a pile of screwed up metal.
Willowgarage are also the guys behind the Point Cloud Library, an awesome computer vision library for processing point clouds (e.g. what the Kinect produces):
I'd say that any command that can make something physical happen in the real world has a whole different set of security concerns than we've faced before. So its a serious concern.
But it's not like it's a new problem. I mean printers make something physical happen in the real world and they aren't exactly new, and last time I checked I didn't have to use sudo to print a document on Linux.
I am not sure one should need root privileges to burn a CD either.
It is, however, smart to put resource limits on a shared printer so that no one user can cause it to burn through reams at a time. And even as expensive as ink is, the ingredients of a sandwich are more expensive than the ink and paper needed to print a typical document.
Additionally, we've been seeing more and more viruses attacking SCADA systems (most notably Stuxnet), which show that people have not been taking the security issues of robotics seriously enough.
xkcd reference aside, hristov's question is totally legitimate. sudo is intended to run administrative commands. normally you would use a "physical" group to grant access like you're describing
Of course, this won't be how food is prepared by robots ultimately. Each step will more likely be performed by small robots optimized for the task.
Food will also probably be driven from place to place by robotic vehicles. You might have one company making noodles and sending them to other companies five minutes away that incorporate them into a dish or other product.
Virtual supply chains will eliminate a lot of capital cost of setting up a restaurant and reduce the delays that destroy freshness and necessitate preservatives. Like fabless semiconductor companies, there might be prepless restaurants.
Another company may just do all the selection and slicing of your vegetables for you. They may be picked overnight at their peak and delivered to you so you can throw them in your omelet. The slicing might even happen on the trip to you.
I can see you selecting a recipe and a web app that prices and source all the ingredients for you. If you love to cook but don't enjoy finding or prepping some or all of the ingredients, such arrangements could help you save money and get better results.
Quite a few people eat the cheapest and most convenient foods they can find. But in the future, healthy food will be cheaper, fresher and will find you, hopefully making crap truly uncompetitive.