Just when you thought your noodle waterslide was the height of Japanese food gadgetry, a ramen shop in Minami-Alps, Yamanashi, Japan, is gaining popularity for its robot chef.
Technically the robot doesn't make the noodles, instead assembling the bowl, including the customized flavor options. Customers place orders on a computer, customizing aspects such as the levels of soy sauce and salt, and richness of the soup. Shop owner Yoshihara Uchida says there are 40 million different flavor permutations.
The noodles themselves are cooked by a human, with the robot creating a perfectly blended soup which is then delivered to the human chef via a conveyor belt, who adds the noodles and toppings. The whole process takes only about two minutes, a minute shorter than instant cup noodles.
The robot was completed in December 2008 after five years of trial and error, including computer crashes caused by spilled soup. Uchida wants to mass produce the robot in the future and "leave my mark out there," which means one day you too can have a ramen robot.
Here it is on the original webpage.
I found this very interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but it does seem like if you follow this road down for a little bit we're quickly moving into pushing out another class of human workers in favor of robots. I'm not sure you could ever have a robot that would be able to do the cooking like a human all the time, perhaps it could get it most of the time but there's something about a person actually being there and doing it that I believe you couldn't emulate 100%. Were it to stay at this level, I think it's a pretty good idea; it does speed up the process and having a computer doing all the measuring does ensure that you get an almost equal blend of ingredients every single time, but I doubt it can factor in freshness of certain ingredients based on touch/scent/sight like a real chef could.
i like bannas because they have no bones:dance:
