Today, we are excited to introduce a new ingredient to the Chef Robotics product portfolio: our robots can now scoop and place curries, including those with chunks of protein like chicken, beef, or tofu suspended in a saucy base.
Chef food assembly robots have already completed over 50 million servings across a wide variety of ingredients in production environments. Each new ingredient presents unique challenges—from inconsistent sizes to wetness and stickiness—and curries are among the most complex ingredients our robots can serve.
Why curries are a complex robotics problem
While they might look straightforward, curries are a difficult ingredient for food assembly robots to scoop consistently and place cleanly and accurately:
- Uneven ingredient distribution: Chunks of protein or vegetables are often scattered unevenly inside the saucy base throughout a hotel pan, causing traditional machines to pick at different sauce-to-protein ratios throughout a production run.
- Saucy consistency: Curries are viscous, making it difficult for standard scooping tools to handle them without dripping or sloshing.
- Temperature variations: A curry’s density varies depending on the temperature and how it was cooked. As it cools, the density changes. Machines need to detect these variations and dynamically change how they scoop from the pan to maintain a consistent pick weight over time.
To solve these challenges, our engineering team has developed:
- A custom-designed utensil with an overlapping closure that prevents spillage during transit from the hotel pan to the conveyor. The utensil also opens in a way that places curries cleanly and accurately in the right location inside a tray.
- Computer vision and ML algorithms that enable our robots to identify the correct pose (position and orientation of the end effector) in a hotel pan to pick from, achieving a consistent mix of sauce and protein chunks on every serving.
We have already rolled out this new ingredient at Cafe Spice, where our robots are actively scooping chicken curry into trays in production. Watch our video to see it in action:
Starting today, curries are officially available to all Chef customers.
If your production line involves similar saucy, chunky ingredients, our robots may be suited to handle those as well. Contact us to learn more about the types of ingredients Chef robots can handle.
