Kitchen Humanoids

Yes, there are kitchen robots out there. Check the follwing link:

that one is only a prototype or a research project.

robots can do pretty much anything that is repeatable. in my mind the question is more how independent they are supposed to be... do they only need to prepare food? how about garbage disposal? how about food preparation before actual meal making (unpacking, washing, peeling ...)? how about obtaining and organizing food? how about checking if ingredients and food are actually usable (fresh/good etc) and not expired or contaminated somehow? how about detecting and handling unplanned things like accidents (dropping or bending utensils, breaking plate or glass, reporting malfunction of appliances...).

If you watch the video that donald mentioned, you can clearly see, that the tasks this robot is capable ( under good weather conditions) are very simplistic. Grabbing sauce and dropping the content.

Also you can see, that the robot is hanging on the ceiling on a linear axis, so his movement is limited to the kitchen unit.

Imagine this robot opening packages. How would that look like? How could he figure out the movement and logic for this task? Opening a regular bottle or a package with sauce powder.

This clearly needs some intelligence, it's too complex to code all of the specialities.

So here comes an Deep Learning AI into play and those AIs need lots of training to be somewhat capable of doing things.

agree, conventional automation is suited for tasks that can be broken down to a finite number of steps or actions. this is something quite usable in setting where small variety and big output volume is needed.

for example system for pizzeria - humans could still do certain type of work (receiving, unpacking etc.) then load ingredients into suitable compartments and press start. this can be integrated with online ordering system or POS or whatever and when request to make specific size and type of pizza is received, machine can make it, saving time and effort for humans. which is why such automation is limited to specific product type (serving drinks, making donuts, etc.) but human assistance to some degree is still required and nothing universal that can be comparable to humans is available so far. that would revolutionize cooking but it would require whole new game to support that. and it would need to start with either very capable AI (something that can manage complexity even if it takes time), or a new form of machine friendly standardized packaging with machine readable labels etc. something that could have similar effect that shipping containers had on transportation. but we like food and not fodder. nobody wants to have same meal over and over. we like to see, smell and feel freshness of the ingredients, and they do come in all shapes and sizes. so AI is the way to go and to bridge the gap, this will need (at least in infancy) to rely on online resource so that same AI on some server can provide service to many bots.