A robot kitchen? Whatever. Are you stupid enough to fall for this? Are you the sort of gullible idiot with millions of pounds or dollars to splurge on a “robot kitchen”? No, us neither. Hey, when you have a vaporware “startup” offering something like this, what's reality got to do with it? Moley – for that is this startup's name – is punting a robotic kitchen, which it claims can rival …
Doubt the robot comes with Marmite either. On a serious note though, Unilever trying to hike prices by 10% when a significant number of their products are made in the UK, from materials sourced here, should be treated with outrage. For once I agree with Tesco.
Having checked the Daily Fail's list of 200 brands now absent from Tesco's shelves, I was quite amazed to discover that I don't use any of them.
I realise I'm a bit of a fringe shopper, but this surprised even me.
More worrying is the fact that apparently sterling is now worth less than a used Tesco Everyday Value bog roll.
Under the circumstances, the prospect of a thirty-grand-a-year "robot kitchen", or anything else, seems even more laughable.
@Oh Homer
Having checked the Daily Fail's list of 200 brands now absent from Tesco's shelves, I was quite amazed to discover that I don't use any of them.
You don't buy Marmite? You must be some seriously warped, unpatriotic sicko!
And I'm tempted to give you a downvote for luring me to the Daily Fail website - OMG! it's worse than I remembered - won't someone think of the children (and people with working brains)?
@Pen-y-gore: At the risk of starting another Marmite flame war...
I tried to like Marmite, I really did, but ultimately the closest I came to nearly tolerating it was when I tried to use it as the bouillon base for a gravy, with predictably tragic consequences. Seriously, I couldn't think of anything else it might be appropriate for, at least in terms of human consumption.
Perhaps it has some useful medical application, say as an alternative for electric-shock therapy, or maybe in the pest control industry, but voluntarily eating for pleasure, something that looks and smells like it may have been used in the construction of the M25, just doesn't seem feasible.
This post has been deleted by its author
welllllllll, bear in mind...
tesco's notorious reputation for screwing suppliers down to minuscule overall margins or even into loss, dairy farmers are quite outspoken on the subject
plus the supermarket industry's appetite for rebates//bungs/ransoms/whatever you call them, exacted from suppliers to place product in more favoured positions
...and it's possible that just a few % cost increase pushes unilever underwater
tesco is playing the pr game to paint itself as the defender of consumers, but without knowing the facts rather than the spin, i'd treat anything either side says with a heavy dose of scepticism
welllllllll, bear in mind...
Actually we do have as near to facts as we're ever likely to. The Ombudsman has reported on Tescos treatment of suppliers, and was on the Today programme just a few days ago reporting that the era of sharp practice is indeed behind them.
As for dairy farmers, that's deeply misleading media spin. Several supermarkets were fined for overpaying them in response to that campaign.
And in any case, Unilever is far too big to be bullied by Tescos.
I wonder if the fact that Tescos current CEO was recruited from Unilever has any bearing on it?
Tesco and Unilever are big enough to look after themselves, and I'm sure they will find some settlement that leaves a reasonable margin for both parties. It's the small suppliers that are going to feel the squeeze.
Harry, if you look carefully at your keyboard you'll find a key labelled with "shift" or an arrow or something which, when carefully applied will convert tesco into Tesco and enable you to start sentences with capital letters.
"Unilever trying to hike prices by 10% when a significant number of their products are made in the UK"
Yes, but the BBC article quotes the drop in the Pound's value as 16%, so maybe they've factored the UK production into the 10% rise?
The details are unclear about what exact products Unilever wants to increase the price of (is it everything) but, given the complexity of the pricing (cross charging, volume discounts and promotional charges etc.) maybe the simplest thing was for Unilever to ask for a 10% increase on all products?
You missed off Mayonnaise because as a country we don't produce any eggs and have to import them from Europe.
Nice timing though to coincide with the high court challenge, anyone would think it was a setup.
I think everyone missed the memo on sarcasm in the comments on this site, of course we produce eggs. I will also say that what a fine day that was to introduce the indyref2 for Scotland and I said "anyone would think it was a setup."
Thanks for the down votes but it seems I was indeed right but wrong story.
Next time you see some brexit story think of buses, they always come in three's.
For this amount of money you can hire a granny from one of the less affluent European Countries to do the cooking and have Tesco/Sainsbury/Ocado/Morrisons deliver the supplies for her to your door.
It will taste significantly better than robot cooking too. You will have to stick a the badge on your door to signify that your house is not Ju^H^HEuropenFrei as per StandartenFuhrer Rudd new Purity guidelines though.
Not for long you can't - and not just because the granny is on Rudd's untermensch list.
Wait until that dollar priced fuel starts reflecting the approaching parity and see if you can afford enough to get free home delivery.
Of course we'll be ok just as soon as we start exporting more cheese and milk - Andrea "two brain cells" Leadsom has verified that Liz Truss was quite correct in identifying lactic exports as the future of the new Britain.
Maths Genealogy project has no mention of him. Pics of his thesis or GTFO.
On an unrelated note, I heard that many foods come in different sizes, so when the robot observes the human with a carrot, it might not be exactly the same size as the next one the robot has. How do they deal with this little problem?
They don't and they never will.
This whole thing is a scam and the CEO is going to disappear with all the money as soon as he's met his personal target of however many millions he wants to bilk.
The company started three weeks ago, and it give it nine more before it folds. Any more than that, and the scam risks becoming too blatant even for the gullible.
Quite. I suppose the Reg would not keep an eye out on it's lifetime would they? Not sure about the nine, obviously this is an exist when adequate cash raised strategy, so the dynamics of that might be difficult to predict (although I agree with their probable end goal)
"The company started three weeks ago, and it give it nine more before it folds. Any more than that, and the scam risks becoming too blatant even for the gullible."
And yet a quick Google search yields this BBC article from April 2015:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32282131
where apparently the tech was being demonstrated later in the year... Something doesn't add up here.
Edit: they have a video of the robot arms working there. Yeah, that's not going to work in real life.
Whether it's cheaper to buy this system, or just eat at Michellin starred restaurants on a full time basis?
Not that I'd do either; I'm one of those old fashioned people that prefer the food un-deconstructed, un-in-a-small-pile-on-an-interesting-plate, and most particularly, in quantities large enough to provide nourishment. With chips.
"Not that I'd do either; I'm one of those old fashioned people that prefer the food un-deconstructed, un-in-a-small-pile-on-an-interesting-plate, and most particularly, in quantities large enough to provide nourishment. With chips."
You won't get chips, and it might be in a pile on an interesting plate, but you are absolutely full after a 9 course tasting menu. And drunk too, if you went for wine with each course.
"un-in-a-small-pile-on-an-interesting-plate"
That's a generous assessment, if my experience of such restaurants is anything to go by. I recall the one time I spent $50 at one of these places, and was served 3 evenly-spaced peas, a carefully sculpted quarter of a potato, a teaspoon of spinach and a rump steak that might have been cut from the hindquarters of a fieldmouse, with a perfectly Spirographed drizzle of sauce, precisely centred on a huge, dazzlingly white plate the size of a semitrailer hubcap.
Which necessitated a further $10 trip to the local fish and chippery afterwards for something resembling an actual meal, instead of something you'd expect to see hanging on the wall in an art gallery.
that was because I couldnt find a url that wasnt a million characters long and looked dodgy , so i went thought the "Let me Google That For you" site to get a shorter one, albeit with unwarranted sarcasm in this case (thats the lmgtfy bit of the url.
Good site to know though - next time the office 'Captain of the Bleedin Obvious' asks a stupid question - reply with lmgtfy link :)
And this line right here is what shows that: “The basic concept of the invention is that the machine records the motions of a human chef, then recreates them. So the robot will only do what a human chef did.” Because everyone with an ounce of knowledge about process automation and machine learning know that recreating human motions for a variable process is inefficient at best and usually just plain doesn't work. That sentence shows there are NO engineers involved in the project, only people who though: "How hard can it be? We'll just throw some money at an engineer and he'll fix it". Any engineer I know (and I work in a large company surrounded by mechatronics, mechanical, electrical and every other flavour of engineer you could wish for) would probably politely decline the job. Even though this project would be right up "my" companies alley.
> Strange, that's how they tech robots in things like car manufacturering. See how the human does it and then repeat.
1. Cars are made from parts which all tend to be exactly the same size when they arrive on the line.
2. Cars all tend to look exactly the same, with a few specifiable variations, when they leave the line.
So, if I want a red car with a CD player, you play programme "colour:255,0,0" at the spray stations, and "Stereo: 1" at the dashboard assembly station. Green with the DAB radio? "0,255,0", "Stereo: 2". Simple.
Now, let's say I want a carrot soup, but a bit more salt than last time, and a bit less pepper. And only for 2 people, not 4. Remember, this robot doesn't weigh the salt and pepper, it just shakes the salt and pepper pots exactly as it's been shown how to. Nobody has ever shown it how to make soup for 2 people, or how long to shake the salt and pepper for. And the carrots are a bit smaller this time, too, and one of them is forked.
A robot taught in this way will fail, spectacularly, at this style of task. Sound like I'm being silly? I'm really not - the process of machine learning they have suggested might work for extremely repetitive, predictable tasks, but is absolutely inappropriate for a chef.
A sensible design for a chef robot would be a big box, with tubes and pipes going to different locations, and as few moving parts as possible. It would look very like an industrial food processing plant, only minaturised. Maybe it could be in a small 20' container, and a conveyor belt could bring the finished products to a hatch? Designing a humanoid to do this task is both silly, and many, many years away from being possible.
Strange, that's how they tech robots in things like car manufacturering. See how the human does it and then repeat.
But car manufacturing doesn't require the frequent exercise of judgement that is a feature of cooking. Watch any of the numerous cookery programmes on TV, and you'll see the chef is tasting all the time. He's also making decisions based on colour and aroma.
How's the robot going to manage that?
@your alien overlord
That USED to be how SOME manufacturers taught their robots. Nowadays it's almost always done by computer modelling to build a program for anything sort of complex. Human teach-in can work in specific situations where absolutely no adaptability is required and you can get away with doing the exact same thing every single time. Cooking with fresh ingredients is not one of those situations.
Using a robot to teach in the welding cell on a car assembly line is nowadays often impossible. The interactions between the robot and the body and between the 6 or more robots themselves as they work on a single body simulatinously have become so complex its very difficult to get the required speed in a human teach in process. At most the final positioning is manually adjusted, but the toolpath to get there is computer generated.
Computer vision and autonomous adaptability are happening more and more in these processes, but it's not something you are going to make happen with an external engineering company in a few weeks/months time. It's an expensive and difficult proposition that can sometimes just stop working for no good reason but work perfectly fine 5 minutes later on the same parts.
I worked with this startup for a while. It works, and doesn't require a super-intelligent robot. The trick is how to make it work everywhere, reliably, with ingredients that can vary in taste, acidity, salinity and many other characteristics. That is the clever bit, not the robot, and it requires MUCH bigger thinking.
In the crowdfunding pitch, someone asked about the cost and got a reply from campaign director Olga Nasalskaya:
"The kitchen system will retail at around £80k initially, falling over time to £40k and less through modification of the system"
The adjoining campaign is called "Jet Pack Aviation", and features a sci-fi pic of a flying ... damn, I so want to say pig.
Neither campaign tempts me, though I do occasionally take a flutter on crowdfunding.
Dara O'Briain was the main presenter (although I don't think he did this item) and they showed this working with exactly the downsides mentioned here. If everything wasn't placed exactly 'so', or some liquid was a bit more viscous than when the chef did it then you just got a mess.
I couldn't work out why you would spend umpty-thousand pounds so that you could carefully measure out ingredients, place them in specific containers in specific places and then get to do all of the washing up afterwards as well.
Employing a human seems a much better bet and value for money.
You seem to have done so little research into this story that you mention Tim Anderson without noting that he was the winner of BBC Masterchef in 2011?
Now as it happens, I agree with the sentiment of the article that this is likely a scam, but I feel sorry for Tim if that is the case, and think it unlikely that he would deliberately participate in a fraudulent campaign.
naaah, I'll give this a pass.
Fools and their money...
Besides, what fun can be had by haxx0ring all the IoT stuff in this type of kitchen (oh everything kitchen will be an IoT jobbie) leading to all sorts of mischief and tomfoolery just when you're in a rush to get to work in order to sort the Boss's laptop out...
I'll happily use all my low-tech gadgets to make good food thankyouverramuchkthanxbai.
.
"Are you the sort of gullible idiot with millions of pounds or dollars to splurge on a 'robot kitchen'?
A fellow by the name of P.T. Barnum is usually credited (albeit without proof) with this phrase:
"There's a sucker* born every minute".
That's exactly what these 'robot kitchen' marketing geniuses are looking for.
Wonders never cease ...
*: US slang for a gullible or easily deceived person.
Cheers.
So, assuming that you're ready to invest 30K a year then you've pretty much covered the cost of getting all your meals prepared for you. You may not be able to finance a live-in chef for that but there are companies that will supply premade meals.
I love technology as much as anyone but you've got to have a sense of proportion with this stuff. For something to make sense it has to be cost-effective, not a toy for a dilettante with more money than sense but a tool for the masses.
I worked with Moley for a few months. It does exactly what it says - copies a chef exactly. Both the ingredients have to be exactly the same as the chef used to get the same dish, and they have to be placed in the right position, plus or minus a few mm, and in the right pots. This won Best in Show at CES 2005.
At 70k it's not aimed at the hoi polloi, but there's quite a big market that will buy it.
There is a way to make the whole thing work as a seamless solution that delivers reliable meals, and the robot isn't where the real value is, but I'd have to shoot you if I told you.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
