Revolutionizing Kitchens: From General Purpose Robot to Professional Chef

As the co-founder and CEO of Cloud Chef, I'm excited to share with you our journey to revolutionize commercial kitchen labor by training general-purpose robots to cook like professional chefs.

1. Nikil is co-founder and CEO of Cloud Chef, a company that automates commercial kitchen labor using "culinary intelligent robots."
2. Cloud Chef's mission is to make high-quality, nutritious food affordable for everyone by replacing human labor in commercial kitchens with robots.
3. They use wheeled robots with two arms instead of humanoid robots because the former are cheaper and more reliable than human labor.
4. These robots can be hired at an hourly wage, and they require no overtime pay, sick days, or turnover.
5. The robots learn cooking skills through a process Cloud Chef calls "culinary school for robots," which involves fine-tuning foundation models and teleoperation to handle edge cases.
6. Robots are trained to understand food, including recognizing when onions are brown enough or steak is cooked to the right temperature.
7. Cloud Chef has developed thermal and visual embeddings specific to cooking that help robots reason through unseen environments and adapt to ingredient variation.
8. They model recipes as state machines based on these embedding models, allowing robots to learn new recipes from one expert demonstration.
9. Robots are robust to appliance variation and can cook on arbitrary portion sizes.
10. Cloud Chef's system outperforms even expert chefs in live cooking tests, estimating progress through a recipe more accurately than human chefs.
11. The system uses a combination of private data collected from active commercial kitchens and public data scraped from the internet to train its models.
12. Cloud Chef's robots are currently about 95% autonomous and 5% teleoperated, making them faster and more reliable than either teleoperation or foundation models alone.
13. Robots can cook recipes from top chefs, adjusting cooking times based on how ingredients were browning during the original demonstration.
14. The system is currently deployed in real-world kitchens and has cooked meals for actual customers.
15. Cloud Chef is hiring and looking for people with expertise in software, machine learning, and robotics.
16. Robots are designed to interact with humans like a human being, with cameras and joint torque data allowing them to pick up objects and work on arbitrary unseen appliances.
17. The system's motion primitives include the ability to turn knobs, making it possible for robots to control most kitchen appliances.
18. Cloud Chef is focused on line cooking tasks initially but plans to expand into chopping and food preparation in the future.
19. Robots can work 24/7 as long as the facility is operating, potentially increasing throughput and reducing labor costs.
20. The system has not yet encountered significant bottlenecks related to dishwashing or cross-contamination, and they plan to focus on higher-value tasks like line cooking initially.
21. Robots can modify steps of a recipe to cook things faster in certain cuisines, but this is still an experimental feature.
22. In the current version, someone at the facility must provide robots with ingredients when needed, but Cloud Chef hopes that future versions will allow robots to communicate with each other to requ

Source: AI Engineer via YouTube

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