Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Monday, 5 March 2018

They're coming for your burgers


http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-43292047/burger-flipping-robot-begins-first-shift

5 comments:

  1. Of course, it's a retrofit into a standard grill setup, so Flippy has to mimic what a human would do. A better setup would be a conveyor belt system to process the burgers and produce them ready to eat. This system still needs a human to assist Flippy at its job.

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  2. Complex, expensive, can't do much...what a misguided use of this technology.

    It would be so much cheaper and less complex to put the burgers in "muffin pans". You have something like a muffin pan, but with wide flat circular depressions for the burgers. The burgers are sandwiched between two of these pans for flipping. So, a worker can flip the whole lot of them at once.

    The burners underneath each burger throttle themselves to minimum, as necessary, to prevent overcooking and keep the burgers warm.

    A cook can do other things, and only flip the burger pans when a notification light flashes.

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  3. I'd have just bought a two-sided grill so I didn't have to flip.

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  4. Al Hunt That's cheatin'.

    Does make one wonder why a simpler solution hasn't been used yet though.

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  5. Well, Burger King broilers are pretty simple - a wire conveyor belt that goes through a broiler. Put the patties on one end. They will drop out the other end cooked.

    But of course, a wire conveyor belt is flexible enough to loop like that.

    For something similar with a flat surface, you could have rotating discs like a tortilla machine.

    But I figure that a pair of muffin pans would be really cheap and reliable and wouldn't take much of a cook's time due to flipping a whole bunch at once. Not many moving parts to worry about breaking down.

    youtube.com - Amazing Automatic Tortilla Making Machine

    ReplyDelete

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