The beginning of the end for fast food workers?

Written by Greg Nichols

As employees are becoming harder to find, fast casual restaurants have been investing in more automation. According to one estimate, the global food technology market is estimated to reach $342 billion by 2027, and there are ample signs that fast food, in particular, is embracing automation.

The latest example? Panda Express has rolled out a robotic wok, dubbed the Panda Auto Wok (PAW). The move comes on the heels of fast-casual restaurants like White Castle, Chipotle, and Jack in the Box adopting robotic systems for the back of the house cooking. Is this the end of the fast food worker? Do consumers even care in a pandemic-influenced market where convenience and touchless delivery reign supreme? 

I connected with Stanley Liu, VP of Operation Services, to talk about tofu, changing priorities in the food business and robots. The bottom line is that the restaurant industry is hyper-competitive, and efficiency is the only way to survive. 

The robot created by the researchers.

by Ingrid Fadelli

A widely discussed application of social robots that has so far been rarely tested in real-world settings is their use as bartenders in cafés, cocktail bars and restaurants. While many roboticists have been trying to develop systems that can effectively prepare drinks and serve them, so far very few have focused on artificially reproducing the social aspect of bartending.

Researchers at University of Naples Federico II in Italy have recently developed a new interactive robotic system called BRILLO, which is specifically designed for bartending. In a recent paper published in UMAP ’22 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, they introduced a new approach that could allow their robot to have personalized interactions with regular customers.

“The bartending scenario is an extremely challenging one to tackle using robots, yet it is also very interesting from a research point of view,” Prof. Silvia Rossi, one of the researchers who carried out the study and the scientific coordinator of the project, told TechXplore. “In fact, this scenario combines the complexity of efficiently manipulating objects to make drinks with the need to interact with the users. Interestingly, however, all current applications of robotics for bartending scenarios ignore the interaction part entirely.”

Silvia Rossi and her colleagues Alessandra Rossi and Nitha Elizabeth John believe that to effectively take on the role of a bartender, a robot should not only be able to interact with humans, but it should also create a “profile” of users. This would allow it to personalize its interactions with regular customers, increasing the likelihood that they will like and continue using the robotic bartending service.