(The Center Square) - Chipotle Mexican Grill announced it is piloting an automatic avocado peeler and pit remover at one California location, and an automatic bowl and salad machine at
Hmm, let’s see. In order to fully prepare a burrito, you would need to perform numerous tactile actions. First would be grabbing a tortilla. Given the floppy, inconsistently shaped, and thin properties of the tortilla, you couldn’t grab one reliably using a standard 6 axis or suspended picker robot, you would need a tortilla loading mechanism, probably spring loaded with a sensor and servo motor to index the tortilla forward into the work area. Okay, so you have your tortilla loading mechanism. Next is to apply sauces like guac or sour cream. You can achieve this using a suspended robot like an ABB FlexPicker with a sauce application tool or other similarly spec’d robot. Oops! Is the customer allergic to avocado? Looks like the robot needs a tooling change! In fact, it’ll need a tooling change anytime a new sauce is requested. Next is toppings and filling. This would need to be performed using dozens of hoppers and sensors to detect the tortilla underneath. Next is an automated rolling device. You might think you could get away with some kind of motorized roll-your-own cigarette type device, but burritos are also tucked, so you would need some kind of machine that can receive a loaded tortilla into a die, with actuators on the sides to tuck, and perpendicular actuators on the bottom to roll. Next, you need to wrap the tortilla in paper. The same type of device can roll the burrito in paper, but it would need to be a discrete device as to cut down on mess. Now, automatically present the burrito to the customer.
You would need roughly 5 automated stations that include robots, sensors, actuators, and bespoke engineered parts. To control it all, you would need a PLC with enough IO slots to manage all of the signals that are required (ie: signal to indicate tortilla is loaded, signal to indicate that sour cream is empty, signal to indicate that tortilla has failed wrapping, etc there are dozens of signals to process even in simple operations), a massive electrical panel to house all of the control circutry, and you would need at least 1 college educated technician (earning roughly $60-80k per year) to maintain the equipment at all times, but more likely, you’ll need at least 2 technicians per shift.
Then comes the commissioning phase, which given the menu and all of the options Chipotle offers, would take months to fine tune the process. It has moving parts and exists in a location with lots of civilian consumers not wearing PPE, so you’ll have to perform a pre-start health and safety report and get that certified by the right governing body (usually state/province level government agency).
Then comes the paperwork required to terminate thousands of staff legally and the added HR cost of taking managers away from managing in order to terminate their entire staff. Not to mention, the added risk of all of your managers losing faith in the company due to severe morale degradation.
All of this assumes 100% uptime, which is an impossibility. Even Toyota’s lines go down for PMs or faults.
Is that easier than just paying your minimum wage earners a little more?
Fully-automated outdoor vending machines for pizza from scratch already exist and aren’t new. It doesn’t seem like a huge stretch to adapt that to roll something into a burrito instead of baking it.
Yeah, this whole list is kind of nuts. Burritos already get mass produced in factories. Those prepackaged ones at the grocery store? Some brands have people hand making them but quite a few are machine made and rolled. It’s not a very big stretch to put that kind of machinery into a restaurant, and 2 techs is about the same price as 4 $20/hr works by their estimate
Hmm, let’s see. In order to fully prepare a burrito, you would need to perform numerous tactile actions. First would be grabbing a tortilla. Given the floppy, inconsistently shaped, and thin properties of the tortilla, you couldn’t grab one reliably using a standard 6 axis or suspended picker robot, you would need a tortilla loading mechanism, probably spring loaded with a sensor and servo motor to index the tortilla forward into the work area. Okay, so you have your tortilla loading mechanism. Next is to apply sauces like guac or sour cream. You can achieve this using a suspended robot like an ABB FlexPicker with a sauce application tool or other similarly spec’d robot. Oops! Is the customer allergic to avocado? Looks like the robot needs a tooling change! In fact, it’ll need a tooling change anytime a new sauce is requested. Next is toppings and filling. This would need to be performed using dozens of hoppers and sensors to detect the tortilla underneath. Next is an automated rolling device. You might think you could get away with some kind of motorized roll-your-own cigarette type device, but burritos are also tucked, so you would need some kind of machine that can receive a loaded tortilla into a die, with actuators on the sides to tuck, and perpendicular actuators on the bottom to roll. Next, you need to wrap the tortilla in paper. The same type of device can roll the burrito in paper, but it would need to be a discrete device as to cut down on mess. Now, automatically present the burrito to the customer.
You would need roughly 5 automated stations that include robots, sensors, actuators, and bespoke engineered parts. To control it all, you would need a PLC with enough IO slots to manage all of the signals that are required (ie: signal to indicate tortilla is loaded, signal to indicate that sour cream is empty, signal to indicate that tortilla has failed wrapping, etc there are dozens of signals to process even in simple operations), a massive electrical panel to house all of the control circutry, and you would need at least 1 college educated technician (earning roughly $60-80k per year) to maintain the equipment at all times, but more likely, you’ll need at least 2 technicians per shift.
Then comes the commissioning phase, which given the menu and all of the options Chipotle offers, would take months to fine tune the process. It has moving parts and exists in a location with lots of civilian consumers not wearing PPE, so you’ll have to perform a pre-start health and safety report and get that certified by the right governing body (usually state/province level government agency).
Then comes the paperwork required to terminate thousands of staff legally and the added HR cost of taking managers away from managing in order to terminate their entire staff. Not to mention, the added risk of all of your managers losing faith in the company due to severe morale degradation.
All of this assumes 100% uptime, which is an impossibility. Even Toyota’s lines go down for PMs or faults.
Is that easier than just paying your minimum wage earners a little more?
Fully-automated outdoor vending machines for pizza from scratch already exist and aren’t new. It doesn’t seem like a huge stretch to adapt that to roll something into a burrito instead of baking it.
https://www.letspizza.com/
Yeah, this whole list is kind of nuts. Burritos already get mass produced in factories. Those prepackaged ones at the grocery store? Some brands have people hand making them but quite a few are machine made and rolled. It’s not a very big stretch to put that kind of machinery into a restaurant, and 2 techs is about the same price as 4 $20/hr works by their estimate