Robotic Kitchen

Image by Sarah Storrer via Eater

This week, I discovered an exciting new restaurant called Spyce in Boston's Downtown Crossing. According to the founders who were graduated from MIT, Spyce is the world's first restaurant that uses robots to prepare most of the meal. This invention had started when these four hungry men were still studying engineering in MIT. As they were from an athlete team and needed food with good nutritions, they invented robots to cook them a tasty meal with a cheaper price and higher efficiency. The robotic kitchen allows the menu to offer food from around the word and cook at the same time. Each meal could be cooked in three minutes or less with only $7.50. These data definitely prove the magic of automation used in a restaurant. Besides the benefit of high efficiency and affordable price, some people may be concerned about the taste of the food. To answer this question, I browsed yelp reviews which most of them are positive feedback; for example, a customer commented, “Completely putting aside how cool it is for a robot to cook your dinner, the food was really good.” I will definitely visit Spyce sometime, where is potential to be the next instagrammable restaurant.

Even though robotic kitchen seems like a better choice for a restaurant in this case, does this mean that it would be no problem at all for the robot to replace the chef to cook all the food? When nowadays the popular media are bombarded with caption like robot stealing jobs, it is necessary have a critical examination of the impact of automation. The founders of Spyce did anticipate this controversy by including this tricky question in website FAQs section as shown below.

There are actually some human employees who performed some tasks that robots are incapable of, such as preparing the ingredients in the kitchen. The collaboration between human and machines turned out to be an important factor in running this business successfully.

The founders might have done task analysis before, which is a useful method to analyze each step and then decide the level of automation on which component. The task should start from customers entering the restaurant, should them guide by human or robots? After customers order on a touch screen, should there be a person help assist them?......So many steps can be further divided into many sub-steps that should be considered as much carefully as possible. Moreover, the robots were designed to be tilted in order to allow customers to see the meal preparation. As far as we can see, there are so many aspects affecting customer's experience. The process is complicated but it is meaningful to work on it in pursuit of harmony between human and robots.