London W1 is the place to go if you have a lot of money to spend on something. Within minutes of each other, you can visit the most expensive private doctor in town, buy a Steinway and a pair of designer glasses that cost more than your mortgage. Wigmore Street is also where the ultra-rich go to buy a kitchen that would make Thorstein Veble weep. It’s also the new home of Moley Robotics, which sells luxury kitchens and a robotic arm.
Moley Dr. It’s the brainchild of Mark Oleynik and is part kitchen salon and part robot lab. It’s a spartan space with three demo kitchens, a large dining table, and some display units showing the different types of artisan marble you can get for your countertop. The point of interest is the X-AiR robot that works behind the front window, which acts as an attraction for potential consumers. It has its own cooking pot, racks, oil and utensils, and with the right help, it can even prepare food.
Molly
Oleynik explained that he wanted to create something to help people eat better by relying less on preservatives. His dislike of reheated and processed foods led him to look for alternatives, which led him to find a way to automate fresh cooking. If you’re coming home late from work, the obvious things are microwave meals or takeout. He believes that people will make more healthy recipes where you just prepare the raw ingredients and let the robot do the rest. The focus on health extends to a database of potential dishes, many of which have been created by the SHA Wellness Clinic.
Moley has its own chef, James Taylor, who adapts each recipe so that it can be prepared by a single-armed robot. The company says it plans to add two or three new recipes each month, and if you have a family meal you’d like to see automatically, you can submit it. Oleynik said the movements are built on the robot after watching a human. the chef prepares the same dish. And once it learns what to do, the robot will be less error-prone than its human counterpart.
Primary A demonstration of Moley’s vision (above) used two armed chefs It initially ran on airlines that earned the company a lot of accolades. Unfortunately, Oleynik admitted that such a robot would cost north of £250,000 (about $330,000). This is very rich for people who frequent Wigmore Street for kitchen appliances. To reduce the price, the company changed the project from a mobile, two-arm version to a single arm. The robot that Moley actually sells is purchased off-the-shelf from Universal Robots, an industrial robot company.
Robot
The single-arm version that’s up for pre-order is known as the X-AiR, which sits outside Moley’s showroom. If you want to buy a set for yourself, you will have to buy a new countertop, two special shelves, a dining table, a control tablet and the robot itself. Prices are in the “if you have to, you can’t afford it” range, but it costs £80,000 (about $105,000) to get in the door. Moley has not yet installed a single robot, but expects the process to begin in the next three to six months. But there are people who have already put down the cash to get one of these in their home and the kitchen that goes around it.
The X-AiR has no built-in vision or sensing technology to allow it to perceive or interact with its environment. The system comes with a camera built into one of the shelves, which I understand is more for tech support than cooking. Instead, the robot arm moves through its space from memory, knowing where all the ingredients, oils and tools should be. To keep the environment as controlled as possible, the pans are kept above the worktops on the stove.
I witnessed Moley’s now standard demonstration using the SHA Clinic recipe Asian Tofu Saute. Staff members prepared the ingredients in advance and placed them in the containers needed for the robot to hold. To start the process, the user must tell the system which ingredients are in which compartments. There’s even a little diagram of how the shelves are laid out, so you can click on “Bean Sprouts” and tap, say, where a pot of them sits in position A1. Once you’ve done that, you can start the car and leave it until it’s theoretically time to eat.
The system is designed to call out each instruction from the recipe so that it is easy to follow. In the video, you should be able to see why it’s interesting to watch the arm begin its ballet to start cooking your food. It is almost theatrically lit before a small amount of oil is poured into the pan to begin heating. After that, he starts adding the ingredients as ordered and mixing the mixture between them. Stirring is more of pushing the mixture back and forth, which is obviously less precise than a human would be. After each stir, the robot scrapes its spatula around the edge of the pan before returning it to its hook.
When the robot adds the next ingredient to its bin, there are similar taps when it double taps the pot on the side to make everything spill out. However, when the spatula and pots were returned to the shelf, I noticed that they had a few ingredients added to them. This is a major challenge for a robot that lacks any vision to understand its local environment. During the demonstration, several strips of leek stuck to the spatula and fell on top of the stove while in motion. It was quickly removed, but I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if it had gotten a millimeter closer to the burner and pan and started burning.
What can’t do
I’m much happier tending the pan and cooking than peeling carrots and chopping onions. So the obvious question is, why did Moley try to automate the seemingly fun part of cooking rather than the food people dislike? Oleynik said it might be possible in the distant future, but there are too many variables to make a carrot-peeling robot work. He added that the safety risks inherent in giving a robot a bladed tool to use.
Moley’s first-generation robots are also limited by the amount of food they can cook in one session. Depending on the meal, they can make eight to ten servings, enough for dinner, but nothing more extravagant. If you don’t have exactly the right ingredients ready to go, robots can’t make any adjustments. You can naturally delete what you don’t have, but beyond that, there’s no room to improvise or change its program to account for seasonal differences in ingredient quality.
Food
I had to work hard to keep myself upright when the robot told me it was making me tofu. If they could see my soul, they would have watched my shoulders drop so low that they fell through the floor, through the basement, and onto the subway line below. Guys, I can’t stand tofu, and I can’t help but cringe every time my vegetarian friends insist we go to a meatless restaurant. Even when I insist that I’m eating “really good” tofu, it tastes like stringy stuff that lacks any inherent flavor, even though I want to crush it in my mouth. So keep that in mind when the robot tells me that the tofu it cooks is really delicious. It had a nice texture and tasted quite delicious, pairing nicely with the vegetables.
The future
Oleynik believes that his robots will primarily find various spaces to fill with money-rich, time-poor people in London and beyond. The internet tells me that a private chef will set you back around £300 a day, so you’ll burn through £80,000 in less than a year. Of course, anyone who can shell out £80,000 for a cooking robot can probably buy their ingredients pre-made, so they can just throw them into boxes and go about their business.
Next, Oleynik believes the technology could be used to prepare fresh food for business and first-class airline passengers. Or in small kitchens where one worker oversees a production line of robots preparing fresh food. His vision extends to any situation where there may be a desire for freshly cooked food, but the economics of a trained chef do not allow for it.
He gave the example of a hotel with 24/7 room service, where people are paid to wait where they are unlikely to want to eat. Or service stations in remote areas where there is potential demand for food but no need to hire a professional chef. Similarly, Oleynik cited care homes where there is a similar conflict between the desire to produce good food but limited budgets.
Of course, it is not clear how much labor is saved, considering that there should be a person who prepares the raw materials and washes the dishes. Anyone handling food would likely have to be trained and paid accordingly, which could eliminate potential savings. But Oleynik is confident that the business can expect a return on its investment within the first year of service.
As for the price, Oleynik believes that the technology will improve so much that the cost will drop significantly. He pointed to one of the demo kitchens in the showroom with a Miele oven and fridge, saying each model costs £5,000 (about $6,500) each. He hopes to be able to sell a £10,000 cooking robot to people who wouldn’t have blinked an eye when spending £5,000 on an oven and £5,000 on a fridge. But if nothing else, it’s perfectly on par with anything you can buy on Wigmore Street.
