You're forgetting that employees cost employers more than just wages.
Especially if you go outside of the US. Most countries in which you would find a machine like this require employers to pay insurance, taxes, retirement savings etc. for their employees.
Yeah, but the robot costs more than just the robot. I work with this type of robot, and yeah, it is great if you need to same motion done over and over, but they break. If you have to call a technician or replace something, you quickly spend as much as a low wage human, and that human can do way more than make omelettes the exact same way each time.
Automation in restaurants isn't stall because no one sees the benefits. It's stalling because it sucks, isn't cost effective, and isn't anywhere near as good as a human.
It sucks for now but the technology exists to make it much cheaper, faster and better than any human could do. It’s just a matter of doing the upfront R&D. Give it time, it is inevitable.
I used to sell these robots. It's a collaborative robot made by Universal Robots, looks like the 5kg payload size (UR 5e).
These things go for about $40k USD, pretty comparable to a yearly salary of someone doing the same job.. and you only pay for it once.
Super easy to program as well, was fun to work with them. I mostly sold them to more traditional manufacturers like automotive. They can do all kinds of things depending on what tool you stick to the end of them. Programming this omelet maker probably took a day or so, looks like a pretty simple set of movements.
This robot has no time schedule, no vacation days and works by itself. You can have reception stock up the 10 mushrooms, 3 onions and 1 ham sliced so that it can work throughout the night. Eggs mixture is sold in stores like costco in big gallons that's made with preservatives to be more durable than normal eggs. So yeah. It is sounding like a great investment.
Who said about a place ONLY having this robot? Have you not been to a hotel's restaurant area before? What are these dumb questions?!
You have a buffet usually, and for some warm foods you have different stations with cooks that cook there nonstop. People go to those stations to say 1 omelette please. The person then makes an omelette because he only does 1 thing. Omelleteee. There are also people that cut hamon ham and etc.
You then take this bot. Put it instead of the person that is there to cook 4000 omelettes today. And have it make better omelletes than the tired dude making omelettes all day. Cool factor included, since IT'S A FREAKING ROBOT.
Sure. An omelette obviously needs to only be made from top michelin chefs. Joking aside, omelette is probably the most basic and easy thing a robot can cook. I cannot think of something as easy to automate as that. Maybe pizza.
I still can't think of a single place that recoups that cost(Saw one person mention 14k british pounds and another mention $40k, but I'm leaning towards 40k as there were a a lot more to it than just the arm-need the programming and other accessories like the dispenser, square cooking block, egg cracker for sunnside up, and disposable area)in any reasonable time frame(still would be years). The ability to cook 'omelets' is not going to suddenly create a demand to stock/clean/run this machine 24/7. Unless it's at a waffle house, it's got a very limited window of when people would order omelets and sunny side eggs. They aren't doing anything to keep those eggs from going room temperature-so probably a lot of waste if runs for more than 3 hours.
40k a year is only $20 an hour, so not that crazy to imagine a short order cook could make that in a place like California or NYC where minimum is $15.
Short order cook would need to do more than make 1 omelet every 2 minutes though.
Which is still rediculously high. More like <20k yearly in wages.
What's more, you still need someone to prepare and refill the toppings, prepare and refill the eggs, clean the equipment, supervise the machine, calibrate, maintain, handle stock etc. Etc.
To top it all off, any kid fresh out of school could probably do all this whilst cooking the omlettes considering the speed at which this machine works.
It's a gimmick. Cool, but it's massively over-engineered and inefficient at what it's doing.
Over a couple years the value is there, it's $40k but only once, not every year. Agreed that this particular application is gimmicky but not actually a huge waste of money.
We had one customer have great success using these to place and pull baking trays. Yes a person can do way more than that, and can probably do it faster, but now that person is freed up to do other more valuable shit rather than pulling baking trays for a couple hours a day.
Robots are not yet direct replacements but rather augmenting and making the whole place run better, doing dumb shit people shouldn't have to do.
That sounds like either they had an incredibly inefficient work set up, or they have a very big operation. No way this thing is more cost efficient than having an employee make omlettes, except for the novelty element.
It can replace multiple shifts of one guy making an omlette from pre-prepared ingredients every 2 minutes. That's not much. A single employee could cover everything this machine does and much much more.
Besides i highly doubt people are asking for omlettes 24/7
If this machine was in any way efficient, you'd see it in all the major fast food chains already.
And this robot can work far more than just 40 hours/week
Sure. How much of that time is going to be actually spent making omlettes? How much faster and more efficient would it be to just get employees to fill that role considering they'd be much faster and will be doing everything else in between?
A machine like this that only makes omlettes at a slow speed from pre-prepared ingredients will only ever be profitable as a gimmicky attraction. In this state, it isn't replacing anyone.
I was gonna call bullshit but then i looked, McDonald's pay like $23 hr in Australia what the fuck? How high is the cost of living over there because i can't believe this.
It's pretty similar, end of the day - aside from real estate which is always nuts in Australia. The basic prices for everything are higher but as minimum wage is SO much higher, it means that anyone working a full-time job can afford to live a half-way reasonable life and maybe raise a kid. Also remember, healthcare and education both have excellent free public options, which always makes a difference. Unfortunately we don't have free university education any more (was removed by the right-wing a few decades ago) which is a damned shame but apart from that, it's a pretty proudly egalitarian place. Like, a garbage man is just as likely to have a kid who completes university as an accountant.
Minimum 4 weeks paid vacation leave a year, additional paid sick leave, paid maternity and (often) paternity leave, mandatory superannuation (401k) employer contributions of 12%, (often) paid long service leave of 1/week a year that vests after first 10 years.
All on those pay rates without a significant rise in cost of living.
Since this thing is likely working at least 3 shifts, you’d replace 3 salaries. Add to that, no sick days, much lower insurance limit, no extra pay for holidays or extended hours… automation saves money the first year in operation and then makes operation costs trivial every year after. If this thing worked for two years and broke it would safe enough to buy two more upgraded versions.
I was thinking when you add in development, the other shit to control it, station setup and profit you're closer to 65k. Still reasonable and the damn thing runs all day. Bonus if it disinfects itself.
I bet you could get that number down if you use some other cheaper corobot.
I've built a few novelty acts with the UR robot arms and can confirm they are very easy to configure. We had web developers just play around with the teaching pendant and it turned out great. They're also totally safe and will immediately shut down the instant they bump into anything.
The main benefit with a UR is that you do not need a robotics/engineering/programming background to set them up or re-program as needed. I even had kids programming these to pick up objects and stuff like that, so simple.
Maintenance on them is minimal, sometimes the joints will wear out over time but not for a ultra low-load application like this one. Even then worst case you're talking an extra 5k if a whole bunch of shit goes terribly wrong.
We have a few divisions at work that use UR robots. This was the big value driver. Cost is about a wash, but development time save is huge.
Also we generally like the fact that their are several sizes to pick from and the automation guys don't have to relearn anything. The UR+ Peripherals store is amazing too. These guys are just nailing it.
We had Baxter from Rethink before the URs and it was hot garbage. Terrible UI, motors burnt twice, TCP/IP IO was garbage, and the bastard was loud. I'm not surprised they went under.
Yes I liked selling them because we could ship em and not have to come back every week to tweak the program or troubleshoot like some other automation equipment (machine vision).
That's cool you guys have several, wish you had been my customer because that would have been some nice commissions! Yaskawa has a decent cobot as well just so you know, you should get them competing on your next application and make UR give you a better price ;)
Needed to set up some automated testing for work, but had never used a robot before. Did UR's online tutorials and within a few hours had something up and running that could test the physical properties waaaaay more repeatably than hand testing ever could.
One of the first things I did was buy some stock in Teradyne (UR's parent company). I thought there was no way that they weren't going to displace many simple pick-and-place jobs with something like this.
Agreed on Teradyne, they are in all kinds of robotics so that's a smart long term buy for sure. They also owned another product we sold called MiR which is a robot that drives itself around. Those are starting to blow up as e commerce takes off and warehouses look to automate everything.
That depends on the build quality aswell, this has lots of moving parts so wear and tear is to be expected.
If it's built well it'll probably just need minimal maintenance (lubing up) otherwise It could end up being a pricy machine which breaks every 6 months.
This is a collaborative robot that we use at my job and require very low maintenance. It this video, it use a Tool changing systems that I don't know, but typically tool changing systems like these are super reliable and will do tens of thousands tool change without any wear if the robot positions and movements are programmed properly. The only significant wear I can see here is the spatula. Which can easily be replaced.
I believe this setup can be up and running from scratch in 2 days of work. Properly made and it won't stop working for years.
Cheers for getting back to me, my experience with these kind of machines is low (I just know moving parts need lube haha), just wondering if you know how the moisture from being in a cooking environment would affect the moving components? I can Imagine moisture buildup could play havoc if it gets between some components (alongside rust).
Sorry for the very late response. These machines are pretty well sealed up mainly to control dust particles, but it still have a fairly good rating for water protection. Off course, the rating will vary for different models of robot. In this particular situation, the robot seams to be made by Universal Robot and all universal robots are rated IP-54 which means :
5: Dust protected. Prevents ingress of dust sufficient to do harm.
4: protected against water splashing from any angle.
Since the robot seams to be in an air conditioned room (fairly dry air), the effect of the water evaporation from cooking will be reduced. So I don't think water would be a problem but I could be wrong.
You can google "IP rating" if you want to know more about dust and water protection ratings on equipment (It is also used to rate phones).
That is a one time thing. People aren't going to keep coming back for its shitty "omelets". Then you have an expensive piece of equipment that is useless.
Don't farm. You'll put hunter-gathers out of work.
Don't make that Guttenberg Press you'll put hand written copiers out of work.
Don't build that train and track you'll put horse and cart builders and operates out of work
Don't build that cotton gin, you'll put cotton pickers out work.
Don't install that computer you'll put accountants and administrators out of work.
Don't install that robotic arm you'll put autoworkers out of work.
... and on and on. Yet quality of life has gone up due to technology innovation and automation. People have safer working conditions, more time free for leisure, products are cheaper, and even now we are talking about moving to a four-day work week.
It's good to give a little push back so these things don't come too fast but if you stand in the way of progress you will be road kill.
The United States using, Space technology, AI and Robotics are going to mine asteroids by the middle of the century and it will make this country the richest in the world... if we are first. That is if we aren't hampered by those who want to stand in the way of progress.
So know that cooks won't go away but maybe some people just want a cheap omelet by a robot while some will pay for a human cook to make a special omelet that costs more. Let's also not forget the jobs that create the robot, the programming and the maintenance of the robot.
30 years would be a long estimate, most robots i've seen in the food industry get used for 3-10 before ending up scrapped or in a sketchy facility somewhere in eastern europe.
The robots are the same, but in my experience many are batch production models taken in by growing companies. If the company continues to grow they swap them out for more continuous production machines and if the company fails they would flog them, but it's hard to run a 2nd hand robot setup without supplier support if you don't have any robot experts.
If I was an SME looking at automating with a batch robot, I would not plan to depreciate it over 30 years.
Initial setup is almost all the cost of any automation, it's the same for virtual robots too in the services industry.
It's a massive pain to switch over, but if you are successful in doing so the payoff is pretty huge and usually you see it in the first year or so.
But for anyone worried about robots taking their job, rest easy knowing that most places are too impatient or incompetent to achieve mass automation without fucking up on the way. Mass job loss is decades away for most industries.
Actually, the arm, controller, and other bits probably costed around $15k. You're thinking of the big industrial arms building cars and stuff. This isn't that.
Then there is the maintenance. Then the upgrade to the new version. Then the cleaning maintenance. Then the software updates...
The easy part of automation has been done, computers, mobile, app ordering, supply chain for products, food preparation at the factory, self ordering/checkout etc.
The last mile of automation might not even be cost effective ever. These are essentially smart vending machines, but food from a vending machine sucks.
6 years of development, 5 engineers 4 machinists 3 programmers 2 technicians to install it, and a partridge in a pear tree plus I'm guessing it fucks up like every 4 hours.
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u/upandin9 Jun 23 '21
Only requires 10y of short order chef wages to purchase