Flippy the grilling robot has finally been hired to make hamburgers after a year of testing.
A year ago we were impressed when we met Flippy, a robotic arm capable of preparing hamburgers autonomously. Today, after a year of testing, Flippy is the new member of the CaliBurger kitchen, where he will be in charge of helping humans in the task of preparing hamburgers on a daily basis. The only difference is that Flippy does not rest and is capable of preparing up to 300 hamburgers every hour.
Miso Robotics, the creators of Flippy, reported that Flippy’s tests ended this Monday and the results have been remarkable, so CaliBurger has decided to keep the robot as part of its permanent staff of employees inside his restaurant in Pasadena, California.
The first robot to get a permanent job
For those who do not remember, Flippy is a six axis robotic arm equipped with 3D cameras, sensors, a thermal camera and a regular camera, which are used to keep track of the meat cooking process. Plus, it’s powered by an artificial intelligence and machine learning platform that keeps you getting better over time.
While Flippy cooks, his fellow humans will be able to follow the process of each hamburger through monitors, where the vision of the robot and the overview of the grill are displayed. Flippy also has the ability to know when it’s time to switch from the raw meat spatula to the cooked meat spatula, plus it knows when to clean the spatula or swap it for a scraper to clean the grill.
Its features and capabilities have made Flippy today the most advanced robot in the world to prepare hamburgers. David Zito, co-founder and CEO of Miso Robotics, said the long-term goal is to “improve the working conditions of chefs and cooks with assistants, not replace them.”
Flippy is priced at $ 60,000 and CaliBurger has already ordered 50 more robots to be installed in its most important restaurants in the United States. This has caused the value of Miso Robotics to skyrocket above $ 14 million, and there are already other restaurants interested in adopting Flippy as their restaurant chefs.
It should be remembered that CaliBurger is emerging as one of the restaurant chains with the highest adoption of technology, just enough to mention that at the end of 2017 they began to replace their ATMs with kiosks equipped with artificial intelligence and facial recognition, which are in charge of raising the orders and making the payment to the clients.
On the other hand, Miso Robotics assures that with this injection of money they will take care of develop new skills for Flippy, with which you can perform more functions within the kitchen and thus make the operation of restaurants more efficient.
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