If you have too much money to spend on something, W1 in London is the place for you. Within minutes, I can visit the most expensive private doctor in the city or buy designer glasses that cost more than a Steinway or my mortgage. Wigmore Street is also where the super-rich go to buy kitchens that would make Thorstein Veblen cry. It’s also the new home of Moley Robotics, a company that sells high-end kitchens and robotic arms that do all the cooking for you.
Moley is the brainchild of Dr. Mark Oleynik and is part kitchen showroom and part robotics lab. It’s a modest space with three demo kitchens, a large dining table, and several display units showcasing the different types of artisanal marble available for countertops. An interesting feature is the X-AiR robot, which operates just behind the front window and serves to lure would-be consumers. They have their own countertops, shelves, oil and utensils, and with the right help, they can even prepare meals.
morley
Photo by Daniel Cooper/Engadget
Oleinik explained that he wanted to create something that would help people eat better food with less reliance on preservatives. I hated reheated processed foods, so my search for an alternative led me to find a way to automate fresh cooking. If you get home late from work, the obvious temptation is to microwave meals or have food delivered. He believes people prefer healthy recipes where they just prepare the ingredients and let robots do the rest. The focus on health extends to a database of potential diets, many of which were created by the SHA Wellness Clinic.
Morley has a personal chef, James Taylor, who arranges each recipe so that even a one-armed robot can make it. The company says it hopes to add a few new recipes each month, and if you have a home-cooked meal you’d like to automate, you can send it to us. According to Oleinik, movements are mapped onto the robot by looking at the human’s movements. A chef will prepare the same meal. And once a robot learns what to do, it will make far fewer mistakes than a human robot.
The first demonstration of Moley’s vision (above) involved a two-armed chef running above an overhead line, which initially earned the company much praise. Unfortunately, Oleinik admitted that the cost of such a robot would likely exceed 250,000 pounds (about $330,000). Even if you frequent Wigmore Street for kitchen appliances, this is probably too much of a luxury. To lower the price, the company stripped the project from a mobile two-armed version to one arm. The robots Morley actually sells are purchased off-the-shelf from Universal Robots, an industrial robot company.
robot
Photo by Daniel Cooper/Engadget
The one-armed version, currently available for pre-order, is known as the X-AiR and is located in front of Morley’s showroom. If you want it for yourself, you’ll need to buy a new countertop, two custom shelving units, a cooktop, a control tablet, and the robot itself. Prices are in the ‘you can’t buy’ range, but the price to open the door is £80,000 (approximately $105,000). So far, Morley hasn’t deployed any robots, but he expects the process to begin within the next three to six months. But some people are already paying cash to have these installed in their homes and a kitchen to surround them.
X-AiR does not incorporate any vision or sensing technology to perceive or interact with its environment. The system has a camera built into one of the shelves, but I understand that this is more for technical support than for cooking assistance. Instead, the robotic arm moves around the space based on memory, knowing where all materials, oil, and tools should be. The saucepan is held in place above the work on the cooktop to keep the environment as controlled as possible.
I witnessed a demonstration of Morley’s now-classic Asian tofu sauté using a recipe from the SHA Clinic. Staff prepared the ingredients in advance and placed them in pots for the robots to grab. To start the process, the user must tell the system which ingredients are in which section. There’s also a small diagram of the shelf layout, so if you tap “Bean Sprouts” you can tap to see, for example, that the pot containing “Bean Sprouts” is in position A1. Once that’s done, you can start the machine and theoretically leave it on until meal time.
This system is set up to recall all instructions for a recipe, making it easy to follow recipes. In this video, you’ll see why it’s so interesting to watch your arms start doing ballet to start cooking. As if in theater, you turn on the cooktop, then pour a generous amount of oil into the pot and start heating it up. Then start adding the ingredients according to the instructions and stirring the mixture in between. Stirring is like pushing the mix back and forth, and it’s definitely less thorough than what a human would do. After each stir, the robot scrapes the spatula against the side of the pot before returning the spatula to the hook.
A similar operation occurs when the robot adds the next ingredient from a special container, double-tapping the side of the pot to make sure everything falls out. However, when I put it back on the shelf, I noticed that there were some ingredients on the spatula and pot. This is a big problem for robots that don’t have any vision to be aware of their local environment. During my demonstration, a few green onion strips stuck to the spatula and fell onto the cooktop itself while it was moving. It was quickly wiped away, but I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if I had gotten an inch closer to the burner and pot and started burning.
What you can’t do
Photo by Daniel Cooper/Engadget
It’s much more fun to tend to the pot and actually cook than it is to peel carrots or chop onions. The obvious question, then, is why Morley wanted to automate the ostensibly pleasurable parts of cooking, rather than the unpleasant parts. Oleinik said it may be possible in the distant future, but there are too many variables to make a carrot-peeling robot work. Of course, he added, there are safety risks associated with having robots carry sharp instruments.
Moley’s first generation robots also have a limit on the amount of food they can cook in one session. Depending on the dish, you can make 8-10 servings, enough for a dinner party, but nothing more luxurious. Needless to say, the robot will be unable to make many adjustments if it does not have the exact materials available. Of course, you can remove what is not there, but beyond that you cannot improvise or change the program to take into account seasonal differences in the quality of ingredients.
food
Photo by Daniel Cooper/Engadget
I was told that a robot would make tofu for me and I had to work hard to stay upright. If they could see my soul, they would have seen my shoulders sag so badly that I fell through the floor, through the basement, and onto the subway tracks below. Hey guys, I can’t resist tofu and eat it with a grimace every time a vegan friend insists on going to a meat-free restaurant. Even if you claim you’re eating “really delicious” tofu, when you crush it in your mouth, it has no real tofu flavor at all, just a stringy taste. So keep that in mind when we say that the tofu made by the robot was really delicious. It had a good texture and went well with the vegetables, making it very delicious.
future
Oleinik believes his robots can fill a variety of niches. First are the rich and time-poor people in London and other parts of the world. According to the internet, private chefs are paid around £300 a day, so that £80,000 will be used up within a year. Of course, if you can afford to spend £80,000 on a cooking robot, you can probably afford to buy pre-cooked ingredients, which you can simply toss in the bin and start preparing.
After that, Oleinik believes the technology could be used to prepare fresh meals for business and first-class airline passengers. Or in a small kitchen, one employee oversees a robotic production line, making food fresh for everyone. His vision extends to any situation where you might want freshly prepared food, but the economics of a trained chef don’t allow for it.
He gave the example of a hotel that offers 24/7 room service, where someone is paid to wait for food when they might want it. Or a service station in a remote area where there is potential demand for food but no need to hire a professional chef. Similarly, Oleinik cited nursing homes where a similar conflict exists between the desire to cook delicious meals and limited budgets.
Of course, it’s not clear how much labor is saved, given that humans still need to prepare and plate the ingredients. And anyone involved with food may need to be trained and paid accordingly, potentially eliminating potential savings. However, Oleynik is confident that companies can expect a return on investment within their first year.
As for pricing, Oleinik believes the technology will become more sophisticated and costs will come down considerably. He gestured to one of the showroom’s demo kitchens, equipped with Miele-branded ovens and refrigerators, and said each model costs 5,000 pounds (about $6,500) each. He hopes to be able to sell cooking robots for £10,000 to people who wouldn’t blink an eye to spend £5,000 on an oven and another £5,000 on a fridge. But at least it’s perfectly in line with everything else you can buy on Wigmore Street.
