Chipotle’s tortilla-making robot will soon help out in a restaurant you can visit. The chain has unveiled a slew of technology updates that include moving the Miso Robotics-made Chippy robot to a real restaurant. The machine will start cooking tortilla chips in a Fountain Valley, California location in October. Feedback from customers and workers will help the company decide on a national rollout.

Artificial intelligence will influence some human cooks, too. Chipotle is piloting a demand-based cooking system that uses AI to tell staff what and when to cook based on forecasts for how much they’ll need. In theory, this lightens the load for employees while making sure there’s enough freshly-cooked tacos and burritos when you show up for dinner. The pilot is underway at eight Orange County, California restaurants.

By CHRISTOPHER CARBONE

Amazon’s new pinch-grasping robot can handle and stow 1,000 items per hour, which is significantly faster than human workers 

The prototype uses cameras, algorithms and machine learning to mimic how human hands grasp items of varying sizes and shapes

A video posted to the retail giant’s science blog showed the machine moving 19 items of varying size and shape in one minute 

‘We’re able to identify a specific item in the scene and use machine learning to know how best to pick it up and to move it quickly and without damage’

A new ‘pinch-grasping’ robot system unveiled by Amazon shows the machine deftly grabbing and stowing a wide range of items – moving at a rate of 1,000 items per hour, which is far faster than a human worker could.

Although humans don’t spend much time figuring out how to grasp a bottle from the back of the fridge that might fall and break open, teaching a robot to deal with cluttered spaces, locate a wide range of items and deftly move them is a challenge for the retail giant’s robotics division.

In a video posted to Amazon’s science blog, the robot prototype can be seen using its finger-like pinchers to move and stow 19 items – including small bags, a broom, a spice container and a small box – in 60 seconds. 

By Ryan Whitwam

We’ve seen tiny robots before, but never like this. Researchers from Cornell have created the first microscopic robots that operate without any form of external control. These nanomachines have all the hardware they need on board, including a basic electronic brain. They just need a little solar energy, and off they go. They’re currently very limited devices, but the designers envision almost unlimited applications. 

The research, which was led by postdoctoral researcher Michael Reynolds, built on research that was already happening at Cornell. Previously, Cornell set the world record for the smallest walking robot, but the new version is infinitely smarter. Reynolds developed robots between 100 and 250 micrometers across with an electronic circuit that controls the robot. That eliminates the need for an external control mechanism like heat or magnetism, which is required for other tiny robots. Reynolds says those robots are more like marionettes than true robots. 

The brain inside these robots is a simple complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) clock circuit. It contains just a thousand transistors, which is nothing compared with the billions that exist in today’s full-scale computer processors. The purpose of the circuit is to generate phase-shifted square waves that control the walking gait of the robot, which it does automatically when the integrated photovoltaic cells are exposed to light. The team tested three different designs with two, four, and six legs. The fastest among them can walk at a blistering 10 micrometers per second — that’s pretty fast given the microscopic scale.