Touted as the first fully autonomous restaurant in the world, CaliExpress by Flippy will soon be launching in Pasadena, California. Although other restaurants may have had robot helpers or AI working along with the staff, at CaliExpress, all the essential processes from ordering to cooking will be handled by machines.
It's not 100% foolproof which is why there will still be a crew of human staff working at the burger bar next to the kitchen, but the size of the crew is much smaller and their purpose, merely to clean up any mistakes that Flippy makes.
As the promotional video shows, the robot hand slides across different sections of the kitchen to flip some burger patties, fry some fries, and place them on the side to keep warm, although the last part shows a man putting the fries in the box and bringing them to customers.
I'm not sure whether this will actually be good for business, for consumers, and most especially, for the labor force, but it might be a start of a more widespread AI revolution, and I don't really know how to feel about that.
For now, at least, the technology is not sophisticated enough to completely eliminate the need for humans in the fast food service industry. But if this proof of concept succeeds, that may be the trajectory we're heading.
(Video credit: Miso Robotics/Youtube)
Oh, and Zume has been using robotics to make pizza since 2018. These guys are far from the first. If one were to search for "Robot Pizza," there are at least five ahead of them.