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Chef Robotics, a distributor in AI-enabled robotic meal assembly for the food manufacturing industry, announced its multi-deposit feature, enabling food manufacturers to achieve 1.5 to 2 times higher throughput rates while maintaining consistency on their meal assembly lines.
Until now, each Chef robot had the ability to use one utensil, picking and placing one portion of food at a time. With Chef's new multi-deposit configuration, the robot's end effector is set up to use up to three utensils simultaneously. This allows the robot to pick an ingredient once and then place it into two or three trays before returning to the hotel pan and picking again.
By amortizing the pick and transport time over multiple trays, Chef robots with the multi-deposit feature can achieve a throughput of 30 trays or more per minute, compared to 15 to 20 trays for the traditional single-deposit configuration. For food manufacturers whose primary emphasis is on throughput, Chef robots can now match the output of a worker and provide a 1:1 worker equivalent.
The Chef team utilized the latest software and AI technology to build its multi-deposit feature. Chef's software accounts for variances across the topography of food levels inside a hotel pan. While a single-deposit robot can simply pick at the pick pose that is most optimal for a single food portion, the multi-pick feature uses a higher level of reasoning to maneuver in a way that ensures equally-sized portions across multiple utensils. The team also developed an AI model to predict when the next tray on the conveyor will come into view while a robot's camera view is occluded.
Some of Chef's customers have already been using the multi-pick feature on their production lines for fresh prepared meals. The feature is now widely available to food manufacturers who wish to automate meal assembly while maintaining high throughput and consistency.
