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Robotics

Burger-Flipping Robot 'Flippy' Gets New Test at White Castle (pcmag.com) 94

Posted by EditorDavid from the serving-Harold-and-Kumar dept.
Remember Flippy, the burger-flipping robot who was fired for being too slow?

Since then he's been busy — and his robotic arm just landed a test gig flipping burgers in a White Castle restaurant in Chicago, reports Mashable: Since its unveiling in 2018, Flippy has cooked more than 40,000 pounds of fried food — including 9,000 sandwiches at LA's Dodger Stadium, the Arizona Diamondbacks' Chase Field, and two CaliBurger locations, where it works alongside humans to increase productivity and consistency.

"I think automation is here to stay and this is the first example of a really large credible player starting down that journey," Miso Robotics CEO Buck Jordan told TechCrunch of the White Castle collab. Engineers are working to install the latest version of Flippy at an undisclosed location in Chicago, where the mechanical fry cook will be integrated into the restaurant's point-of-sale system, allowing it to get to work as soon as an order is placed. Customers in the Windy City can keep an eye out for Flippy starting in September.
That "latest version" is named Flippy ROAR (Robot-on-a-Rail), according to USA Today.

Citing a statement from White Castle, they report that "The idea is to reduce human contact with food during the cooking process..."
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Burger-Flipping Robot 'Flippy' Gets New Test at White Castle More

Burger-Flipping Robot 'Flippy' Gets New Test at White Castle

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  • They will eventually get these right (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday July 18, 2020 @11:13AM (#60304031)
    It's not if it's when. And as the Corona Virus has shown putting restaurant workers out of a job wrecks our economy.

    Trouble is nobody wants to pay people to stay home (the pandemic would be over if that was a thing here).

    What are we doing to do with all these people who aren't needed? They're not smart enough to go back to school and become doctors. The wouldn't be fry cooks if they were.

    As for the rich needing them to buy stuff, they don't really. Did the king need peasants to buy his products? When you already own everything you don't need to sell anything.

    We've got a few years to figure this shit out before it all collapses on us.

    • Re:They will eventually get these right (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Riceballsan ( 816702 ) on Saturday July 18, 2020 @11:32AM (#60304113)
      Fully agreed with everything except the "they are not smart enough". I mean some maybe, Some fast food workers are working to dent in some of the bills while they are going to school, Some maybe can't afford to work, go to school and raise kids at the same time, and find school the only one they can put off. You are right about everything else. But there's a whole lot more barriers to going to school to become doctors, than just intelligence. If they had a crazy rich benefactor willing to pay for all their living expenses, childcare etc for the duration of their schooling, I'd be willing to say most fry cooks probably could become something much better (Most not all, I'm not denying the existence of people without potential, just saying I think there's far more people with potential without opportunity).
      • Please take a look at the distribution of basically any continuous characteristic in humans. The bell curve is real. There are a lot of dumb people out there. This isn't condescending. It's just the truth. It is cruel to tell these people they can be anything they put their mind to. It is insane to base policy on that notion. At least a third very likely can't. One in three people have an IQ of 92 or less. The average IQ associated with being an MD is 125. Only one in 20 people have an IQ of 125 or higher.
        • I didn't say specifically doctor, I said something better than they are, You don't think some middle managers, and random people at businesses aren't below average IQ. Yes there's people without potential to go above crap jobs, but there's quite a few dumb people in quite well paying jobs as well. Do you think wealthy people just all have superior genetics and their kids and that's why most of their kids are successful?
          • You don't base policy on the exception. Some people might succeed in spite of their innate (lack of) ability. Rich parents are a huge leg up. There are certainly lots of people who could do something better. But lots more couldn't. There is always going to be a big chunk of the population with just enough cognitive ability to hold a supervised job that consists of mostly repetitive labour. I'm not trying to make it look like their value as human beings depends on their IQ. Quite the opposite. Policy needs t

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This is why we must keep abortion legal.

    • Bullshit.
      Brains has zero to do with getting ahead in the USA.
      Working hard has zero to do with getting ahead in the USA.
      Its all about who you know, and who you blow.
      And no, not everybody has equal opportunities
      despite the last 40 YEARS of right wing propaganda.
      Absolute bullshit.

      • Don't project the excuses for your own failure on the rest of us.

        • Don't apply your survivorship bias to the rest of us. Nothing correlates with a person's income so closely as their father's income, explain that.

          • Besides the advantage of actually having a father? According to some statistics, 85% of all incarcerated children come from fatherless homes. It's one of the strongest factors contributing to young black men in prison, as best I can tell stronger than tested IQ and parental income.

            • That's quite a red herring, let's try to stay on topic:

              https://www.wnpr.org/post/geor... [wnpr.org]

              • Yes, I answered your question. If anything, being the child of a single parent is one of the greatest causes of childhood poverty. Since 80% of single parents are mothers, it's also mostly single mothers raising children alone. Other consequences include the greater rates of suicide, alcoholism, abuse, and drug dependency for these children, all of which are _causes_ of poverty.

    • It's not if it's when. And as the Corona Virus has shown putting restaurant workers out of a job wrecks our economy.

      Do you seriously not understand the difference between putting restaurant workers out of a job and closing down all restaurants? Do you equate shutting down the economy and casting 20 million workers off their jobs the same as automating a menial task in a fast food restaurant?

      Our Covid-19 response showed us what happens to the economy when you shut it down Across the board, we didn't just shutdown restaurants.

      Taking an employee off the grill results in one lost job per shift per restaurant, period.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Do people not understand the difference between digging a footing by hand and doing it with a back hoe. The difference is back breaking work in the hot sun, day in and day out, really fucking hard labour.

        Why the fuck would anyone force anyone to do work when it can be automated the idea is all sorts of psychopathically insane.

        You automate more, so people can fucking work less, that is the whole fucking idea, not some insane you must make workers work or starve them to death as being useless insanity. We s

    • putting restaurant workers out of a job wrecks our economy.

      A sudden shock that puts many people out of work at once is bad for the economy.

      The gradual introduction of labor-saving automation is good for the economy.

      Productivity improvements not only grow the economy and increase living standards, they are the ONLY thing that does so.

      What are we doing to do with all these people who aren't needed?

      Prior to Covid, unemployment was at historic lows and businesses reported that their biggest problem was a shortage of labor.

      So your concern about "not enough jobs" is the exact opposite of reality.

    • No, paying ppl below minimum wage AND THEN laying off ppl is what hurts the economy.
      When these restaurants move towards more automation AND we start paying Americans a LIVABLE wage, then we will see more $ injected into our economy.

    • They're not smart enough to go back to school and become doctors.

      There are many barriers to college/university education besides intelligence, like money, or racial quotas.

    • It's not if it's when.

      That seems pretty close to certain.

      And as the Corona Virus has shown putting restaurant workers out of a job wrecks our economy.

      It doesn't "wreck" our economy. It changes it. Just like the steam engine, and the telegraph, and automatic telephone switching equipment, and every other advance in productivity changed it. There will be people who will not be doing the same job they were doing before. It's sad when a blacksmith can't make the transition to automobile mechanic (or whatever), or an elevator operator can't make the transition to bus driver (or whatever), but most can.

      This Neo-Ludditeism, decade after decade, is growing rather old.

      And so is this bizarre inability to distinguish between feudal aristocrats and "captains of industry", for want of a better, less archaic term.

  • It is easy to build a burger-flipping machine and they already have them.

    The whole thing here is to make it a "robot," by which we mean an anthropomorphized machine.

    These companies are burger-flippers all the way up, even their C-levels are dumb as boards. Just install an extra burger-flipping station right in the front, closest to the customers, and put Flippy there. It doesn't matter how slow "he" is; that's why he has his own work station! Done. PR achieved.

    • Not sure what you're referencing, but "Flippy" is anything but humanoid in design or purpose. TFA has a picture, but there are more visuals at the manufacturer's website [misorobotics.com] as well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      No need to flip the burgers. Burger Kind has never flipped burgers. Neither has McDonald's for over 50 years.

    • Hey this gave me an idea. Buy a flippy and put it in your store window, but sell conveyer belt oven cooked burgers. Businesses do bait and switch all the time with menu pics.

  • White Castle did a lot of testing decades ago to create a burger that doesn't need flipping while cooking. About the only place the robot would be an advantage is placing the burgers, onions, and buns on the grill.

    • That or just picking up the burger/onion/top bun set up from the grill and setting it on the bun bases.

      I used to work at a White Castle clone named Castleburger in Florida a long long time ago.

    • Yeah, I thought that everybody knew that White Castle doesn't flip their burgers. That's why the wafer-thin patties have five holes in them; it helps to let them cook through from one side.

      It just doesn't make sense to name a White Castle slider robot "Flippy". Maybe it would be more appropriate to call it "Wasted with the Munchies at 3:00 a.m."

  • Now we'll get even more flat earth videos on YouTube when the people making them lose their job.

  • Since its unveiling in 2018, Flippy has cooked more than 40,000 pounds of fried food

    Don't know if Flippy now is fast enough, but for sure it smells awfully!

  • It's not real AI ... (Score:3)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Saturday July 18, 2020 @11:55AM (#60304221)

    ... until it can bend down and pick up a dropped patty from the floor and return it to the grill. Otherwise it fails the Turing test, as one could easily differentiate between a robot and human made White Castle burger.

  • Once it can and do so very well, will it beat most burger-flipping humans.

  • Are you tired of food sitting under a salamander (heat lamp) get overheated?
    Next new tech will be one with a thermostat! It will automatically not get the food too hot or too dry, saving humans from having to do it!

    Are you tired of toasting your bread on BOTH sides and not letting it get unevenly browned?
    Next new tech will be this think you put your bread it and it toasts both sides equally so a human with a griddle doesn't have to.

    Man I can't wait for more slashdot weekend articles on advances in technol

  • ... for a human! Even a mentally disabled one!
    We should focus on tasks that are worth our time.
    Which would be higer paid too. So everyone needs to work fewer hours. And there is your lack of jobs problem, solved.

    Of course when some leech sucks off all the wealth from the automation, before it goes to those who do the actual work, ...

  • "The idea is to reduce human contact with food during the cooking process..." More like reduce human contact with paychecks.

  • Flippy: It looks like you're trying to fry some food. Can I help?

  • Burger King would never need this. Why? They don't have a grill, they have more like an oven with a conveyor. Raw burger in one end, cooked burger out the other. Just hook a feeder to the one end and no one has to stand there and insert frozen burger patties.
    Oh and by the way someone still has to assemble the damned burger at the other end anyway. Unless you want a half-assed assembly-line machine-made excuse for a goddamned burger that can't have anything special done to it.

    Stay home and learn to make

    • Oh and by the way someone still has to assemble the damned burger at the other end anyway. Unless you want a half-assed assembly-line machine-made excuse for a goddamned burger that can't have anything special done to it.

      It looks like someone forgot we were talking about White Castle, not Bobby Flay's Burger restaurant... I think White Castle is incapable of doing "anything special" done to their burgers.

      • I wouldn't eat a White Castle 'burger' on a dare, not if you paid me. Even more non-food than McDonalds. Not counting them as serious.
    • White castle is not healthy for sure. They have a fairly unique flavor infused by greasy onion buried into the burgers. This pretty much requires frying. White castle used to have holes in the patties and I thought they stuck a cover over the patties to partially steam them. I had a roommate who would drive 100 miles to get them. I went with him a couple of times and was kind of fascinated by the process.

  • This should be a machine that is loaded with ingredient cartridges (patties, buns, toppings, cheese slices). That cooks the patty with a heating device appropriate for a robotic machine to use not a human. Then assembles and packages the burger and spits it out. You could automate it all and have a few people there to keep loading more raw material. It couldn't be any more complicated to build that a high end copier.

    • They are headed that way. The hard part is replacing the cooking area. Once they have patties done, they can easily add the rest.
      So, give it time.
    • Shrink it down to the size of a copier and then you've turned fast food into a vending machine. Only job left will be the guy that drives from the warehouse with frozen patties and loads it up. (Soon to be replaced by a gig economy worker or a drone.)

  • They could've just built a mini assembly line in the back.

    The ingredients are loaded up in the back,
    and they are cooked/assembled by more conventional
    automated factory-style process. A conveyor belt sends the patty through an grill that cooks
    both sides of the patty simultaniously, the
    patty is dropped on the bottom bun, lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, and the top bun
    are dropped on the patty from chutes etc...

    This robot is more like "wE aRe sO fUtUrIsTic aNd wE gOtZ tEh aI"..a marketing ploy to draw customers who

  • "It's going to save us money in food costs because there will be less waste. The other savings will be in terms of output," Jamie Richardson, White Castle's VP of shareholder relations, said in a statement to TechCrunch. "That's where we see it having the biggest impact."

    They aren't claiming it will reduce labor costs, they are seeking higher output, less waste. Later in the article they point out they plan reassigning displaced grill workers to other tasks in the store.

    Sure, it could be PR spin, but as a publicly-traded business, White Castle could open itself up to lawsuits if it lies to shareholders.

    • Is white castle publicly traded? a stock? are ya sure?

    • Actually, these will lower TOTAL labor costs, while allowing individuals to be paid higher wages. This is needed all over America and the west.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by thomn8r ( 635504 )

        Actually, these will lower TOTAL labor costs, while allowing individuals to be paid higher wages.

        Dumbest thing I've read all day. One of the benefits of hiring fewer people is downward pressure on wages for everyone else. The only one taking home more is the guy who owns the machine.

        • at the same time that we move towards robotics, we need to bring minimum wage up. Likewise, deal with illegal aliens. Issue solved.
  • You just need to stop a second and think of all the jobs being created by this insanely wasteful use of technology. The burger flipping robot race has just begun and if we start suggesting the obvious, cheaper, and more reliable solutions, we will be killing an industry that could benefit us all. Just bite your tongue and go with it.
    • Huh? Robotics are needed in a BIG way. The west has too many issues with too low of pay for the west, but higher than other nations, which encourages illegals.
      In addiiton, robotics will be needed for off-world.
  • Seriously surprised that robotics is not doing the deep fried stuff. French fries; Chickens; Fish; Hash browns, etc. These are normally individual OR easy enough to put in a basket. That makes these IDEAL for moving from a freezer to a fryer to packaging without humans.
    Who really would be interested in all of these are part-time vacation areas. For example, all of the ski resorts are ideal for this. They could then limit the number of ppl that are hired for say 3-6 months and then let go.

  • Show me a robot that can clean the griddle, and the rest of the kitchen, and maybe I'll be impressed.

  • Good excuse in corona times. But the real idea is to reduce the contact of food with humans that need to get paid.

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