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Would your burger taste as delicious if it was made by a robot?
You’ll soon be able to find out at CaliBurger restaurants in the US and worldwide.
Cali Group partnered with Miso Robotics to develop Flippy the burger robot, which made its debut this week at the Pasadena, California CaliBurger.

Miso and Cali Group aren’t calling Flippy a mere robot, though; it’s a robotic kitchen assistant. And it’s not the first of its kind. San Francisco-based Momentum Machines has also been working on a burger bot for a few years.
Flippy brings some fresh tech to the table (no pun intended). Whereas in the past a typical assembly line robot (say at a car factory) needed everything lined up perfectly in front of them—precisely and consistently positioned—to do their work, robots like Flippy are using the latest round of machine learning software to locate and identify what’s in front of them and learn from experience.
That is, Flippy’s flexibility is a great example of robots becoming more flexible, in general.
Miso’s CEO compared Flippy to a self-driving car because of the way both use feedback loops to reach higher levels of performance.

Flippy doesn’t look much like how you may imagine a robot either. Its body is a small cart on wheels, and it has no legs and just one arm. The arm’s six axes give it a wide range of motion and allow it to perform multiple functions (as opposed to simply moving up and down or back and forth).
There’s an assortment of detachable tools the bot can use to help it cook, including tongs, scrapers, and spatulas, and a pneumatic pump lets it swap one tool for another, rather than a human having to change it out.
Combined with its AI software, these tools will allow Flippy to eventually expand its chefdom beyond just burgers—it could learn to make items like chicken or fish.

"CaliBurger has committed to using Flippy in at least 50 of its restaurants worldwide over the next two years."

Some of Flippy’s key tasks include pulling raw patties from a stack and placing them on the grill, tracking each burger’s cook time and temperature, and transferring cooked burgers to a plate.
Flippy can’t single-handedly take a burger from raw to ready, though. Rather than adding extra ingredients itself, the bot alerts human cooks when it’s time to put cheese on a grilling patty. People also need to add sauce and toppings once the patty is cooked, as well as wrap the burgers that are ready to eat. Reportedly, Momentum Machines is working to include some of these additional burger assembly steps into its system.
Sensors on the grill-facing side of the bot take in thermal and 3D data, and multiple cameras help Flippy ‘see’ its surroundings. The bot knows how many burgers it should be cooking at any given time thanks to a system that digitally sends tickets back to the kitchen from the restaurant’s counter.
Two of the bot’s most appealing features for restaurateurs are its compactness and adaptability—it can be installed in front of or next to any standard grill or fryer, which means restaurants can start using Flippy without having to expand or reconfigure their kitchens.
CaliBurger has committed to using Flippy in at least 50 of its restaurants worldwide over the next two years.
What does this mean for the chain’s current line cooks, and for the future of low-skilled jobs in the restaurant industry?
Miso’s CEO acknowledged that his company’s product may put thousands of people out of work, but he also said, “Tasting food and creating recipes will always be the purview of a chef. And restaurants are gathering places where we go to interact with each other. Humans will always play a very critical role in the hospitality side of the business given the social aspects of food. We just don’t know what the new roles will be yet in the industry.”
Cali Group’s chairman envisions Flippy working next to human employees, not replacing them completely. But he also noted that the bot is part of a "broader vision for creating a unified operating system that will control all aspects of a restaurant, from in-store interactive gaming entertainment to automated ordering and cooking processes, 'intelligent' food delivery and real-time detection of operating errors and pathogens."
As more restaurant operations become automated, demand for low-skilled jobs like line cooks will decline, but there may be a jump in demand for high-skilled workers like engineers. Even if the number of total jobs stays more or less stable, though, it will be difficult to bridge the resulting skills gap. One possible solution is for the same companies whose technology is eliminating jobs to invest resources in retraining displaced workers to fill newly created jobs that may require different skills.
Meanwhile, robot-made burgers may bring benefits both to consumers and to the restaurant industry; money saved on wages can be applied to sourcing better-quality ingredients, for example, and having machines take over a kitchen’s most hazardous tasks will improve overall safety and efficiency.
Image Credit: Miso Robotics Continue reading →

For most people the phrase “medical robot” probably brings to mind the ground-breaking da Vinci surgical system that has revolutionized minimally-invasive surgery. Either that or the 2-1B droid from Star Wars: the Empire Strikes Back if you’re a sci-fi nerd.
But some of the most exciting progress in medical robotics is actually taking place at the micro and nano-scales. A recent review study in the journal Science Robotics highlights that materials and biomedical science have started to come together to create a new breed of miniature robots able to deliver drugs, carry out precision surgery and dramatically improve diagnostics.
“Designing miniaturized and versatile robots of a few micrometers or less would allow access throughout the whole human body, leading to new procedures down to the cellular level and offering localized diagnosis and treatment with greater precision and efficiency,” the authors write.
Designing devices on this scale has some major challenges, though—first and foremost, movement. Micro and nano-scale machines operate in low-Reynolds number environments, which essentially means inertia plays almost no role. At this scale they are also subject to Brownian motion—constant bombardment by the atoms or molecules that make up the gas or liquid they are in and causes them to move erratically.
This means that traditional swimming and navigation strategies that would be used in macro-scale robots often don’t work, and so novel approaches have to be devised, often inspired by the micro-organisms that share this environment. At the same time, conventional approaches to powering devices like batteries can’t be scaled down to this level, so researchers instead have to rely on chemically-powered motors using fuels found in the environment, or external power sources like magnetic fields or ultrasound.
But despite the onerous constraints, the authors highlight that scientists have managed to demonstrate a host of miniature robots that are able to navigate through complex biological environments to remove biopsy samples, deliver drugs and diagnose disease. Here are four areas where these tiny devices are proving to be promising approaches to medical problems.
Targeted drug delivery
Nanotechnologists working on drug delivery is nothing new, but most existing solutions rely on the body’s natural circulatory system to get medicine where it needs to go. By using miniature robots, though, it’s possible to get drugs to their destination faster and more accurately, which can make them more effective and also reduce side effects from powerful drugs.
A popular strategy for propelling these vehicles are chemical nanomotors—tiny particles whose make-up causes them to break down a chemical fuel to create bubbles that propel them forward. Often the fuel has to be added along with the nanomotor, and the review notes that most of these studies have happened in the test tube rather than in living organisms.
But recently, in vivo experiments have started to become more common, with promising results including synthetic motors powered by biological fluids such as gastric acid or water. Many of these solutions also degrade to non-toxic substances, removing the problem of having to retrieve them after they’ve fulfilled their purpose.
There have also been in vivo demonstrations of delivery devices powered using external sources such as magnetic fields or ultrasound. In one particularly impressive study, researchers co-opted bacteria that naturally swim along magnetic field lines and towards low oxygen concentrations to act as robots. They attached drug-containing droplets to the bacteria and used magnetic fields to guide them to the oxygen-depleted regions of tumors usually highly resistant to therapies.
Precision surgery
While huge progress has been made to reduce the invasiveness of surgery, nanorobots hold the promise of operations whose only superficial wound is the puncture hole from an injection. They will also be able to operate in hard-to-reach locations and carry out procedures at scale as low as the cellular level.
One promising class of miniature robots are “microgrippers,” which are able to capture and retrieve tissues and cells. Tethered versions of these tools controlled by mechanical or electrical signals have been around for a while, but they are still comparatively large. Now, advances in materials science have opened up the possibility of an untethered version. These devices rely on self-folding capabilities to close around the target tissue and can be triggered by a variety of environmental cues such as temperature or pH.
Magnetically-controlled microrobots also show great promise for surgical procedures due to the ability of magnetic fields to penetrate thick tissue. Researchers demonstrated the ability to carry out surgery inside a living rabbit’s eye using such a device.
Ultrasound can also be used to trigger so-called “microbullets” that reach speeds of six meters per second by vaporizing biocompatible fuel, allowing them to penetrate deep into diseased tissue. Finally, “nanodrillers” can use chemical fuels to power a corkscrew motion that lets them drill and embed themselves into tissues.
Sensing and detoxification
Put a nanomotor in the presence of the correct fuel, and it will keep on moving. This continual motion makes them particularly useful for speeding up both the detection of specific compounds in a solution and the removal of toxins from an environment.
Attach a bioreceptor to a constantly moving nanomotor, and it will collide with its target molecule far faster than if it was simply floating free, essentially creating a self-mixing solution. These devices can even be powerful enough to both detect and transport target cells, while others are small enough to operate inside cells.
In a similar way, self-propelled nanorobots can rapidly target and remove toxins in biological environments. Red blood cells have been shown to be excellent toxin-absorbing nanosponges, and so several approaches have combined red blood cells with nanomotors to create robots capable of absorbing and neutralizing harmful substances.
Future challenges
Despite the progress in the field, the review highlights a number of challenges that need to be addressed. First and foremost is the fact that many of the nanomotors being investigated rely on hydrogen peroxide as a fuel, which is not biocompatible.
While powering nanorobots using magnetic and ultrasound fields is feasible for surgical procedures, many promising applications require the devices to be able to act autonomously, without human intervention. Recent work on nanomotors that use enzymes to power themselves with chemicals found in bodily fluid like glucose or urea are promising, but still require considerable work.
Biological environments are unpredictable places with constantly-changing conditions, so the field needs considerable innovation in materials to create multifunctional, fault-tolerant robots that won’t malfunction outside of narrow comfort zones. Coupling synthetic nanodevices with biological materials is one promising approach to avoiding things like immune responses.
Scaling the production of these devices up to the numbers required for therapeutic purposes at reasonable cost is another challenge that needs to be overcome, with 3D nanoprinting one promising avenue.
Image Credit: Shutterstock Continue reading →