The kitchen and cooking profession has become increasingly unpopular in recent years due to the long working hours on top of the jobs’ continuous exposure to heat. With shortage in skilled workers, businesses in the HoReCa segment are seeking for long term solutions to this problem.
One interesting solution by Cook-e. a French company, is in the setting of a robotic kitchen to take over the laborious tasks. In this scenario, the service personnel or guests themselves place the order with a tablet, input terminal or app. Then the kitchen will start the fully automated preparation of a customised dish.
The robotic kitchen will start to assemble ingredients according to recipes stored in the software. Dosing containers move along a shelf with storage modules. Depending on the menu chosen, rice, shredded chicken, maize and other chopped ingredients are retrieved with an accuracy of 0.5g. Once all the ingredients have been retrieved, the contents are poured into one of 3 rotating cooking modules, each resembling a wok pan. They can rotate, tilt, mix, fry and stir. Just 210 seconds after the order is placed, the dish is ready to serve. Cook-e says that 250 dishes can be prepared per hour, including delicious risottos, chili con carne and osso buco. Quentin Guilleus, the company’s Co- Founder, believes that robotic kitchen has a bright future. “Automating simple tasks reduces costs, allowing restaurant owners to invest more in ingredients and service for a better restaurant experience with dishes of consistently high quality.”
drylin ZLW: because space in kitchens is worth its weight in gold
To allow as many restaurants as possible to benefit from automation, Cook-e has designed the robotic kitchen to be space-saving. Rental prices are high and kitchens are correspondingly small, especially in major cities. All components are therefore compact, from ingredient storage modules to dosing container positioning mechanics. The engineers initially considered using a linear guide with ball-bearing-supported carriages. That, however, would have taken up too much space, so the experts decided on an alternative – electric igus toothed belt axes. Michael Hornung, igus Product Manager for drylin Linear and Drive Technology said, “drylin ZLW-series toothed belt axes are the ideal solution for light adjustment and positioning tasks in limited space where every millimetre counts. The clearance height is just 3mm.
Guilleus said, “The igus solution allows for a more compact design, so our machines’ volume can be reduced.” The robot kitchen requires just 2.7 sq.metres of floor space.
Lubrication-free polymer slide bushes ensure hygiene
However, the robotic kitchen’s components need not only be compact, but it also needs to meet the strict hygienic requirements of HACCP, a hygiene concept that NASA originally developed to ensure food safety for astronauts.
Guilleus added, “The materials chosen, mainly stainless steel and PETG, are suitable for contact with food.” The toothed belt axes fit seamlessly here because igus manufactures the trusses and linear carriages from corrosion-resistant stainless steel. The carriages move on linear plain bearings made of high-performance plastic. The key is that the plain bearings require no lubrication and are therefore completely maintenance-free. External greases and lubricants have been eliminated, so all bearing points and surfaces
are hygienic, extremely easy to clean and also quick to be ready for use again. This is important as the kitchen automatically cleans itself after every meal prepared, which involves the dosing containers and pan tilting downwards. A high-pressure water jet with cleaning agents performs the actual cleaning before it can be used to prepare another dish.
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igus Singapore Pte Ltd
