LIQUID KITCHEN
Automated food manufacture is one of my dreams, both from the
perspective of someone who is too lazy to like cooking for himself
(yet too cheap/rural to eat out), and someone who likes the idea of
the catering/restaurant industry (their product is always in
demand) if only it had higher margins and less human contact.
It's not a new idea:
https://hackaday.com/2015/06/09/retrotechtacular-automatic-for-the-people/
https://hackaday.com/2018/10/11/i-ate-a-robot-hamburger-before-the-restaurant-went-out-of-business/
But somehow it never seems to have taken off. My guess, reflected
in that first article and the few comments to it not going off on a
racism tangent, is that the problem is the cleaning of the
equipment used to process the food.
Handling all the solid, yet soft, ingredients with machines is
tricky without getting bits of food stuck in the mechanisms, then
requiring the whole machine to be completely disassembled to clean
everything. By using humans you never have to assemble the
implements in the first place, so they are easy to clean and the
humans take care of their own hygine themselves (theoretically at
least).
My concept removes the element of direct contact with implements.
Ingredients are introduced into a tank filled with a liquid (water,
cooking oil) or pressurised gasses, then transducers acting on the
liquid cause the movement of the ingredients through currents or
pressure waves. The liquid is heated for cooking, or if a gas is
used, IR or microwave heating is possible, and a CO2 laser beam
directed by a mirror-galvanometer can be used for slicing.
The completed food item is directed into an air-lock, from which it
can be removed by the customer. Cleaning is reduced simply to the
task of cleaning the tank, largely acheived by flushing the
liquid/gas, and then conventional automated sterilisation
techniques could easily be applied to cleaning the tank surface.
All transducer, etc., mechanisms would be sealed from the tank
interior, so need no cleaning.
High-power transducers have been demonstrated manipulating tiny
objects in air. Presumably larger weights can be manipulated within
more dense substances. Water currents have much more strength - can
these be controlled through IR or microwave heating alone? There
are lots of complicated details to work out with this concept, but
I think it could work quite well with enough refinement of the
design. There's also no need to dedicate a separate piece of
machinery to each ingredient, except for releasing it into the
tank, so smaller machines than the conventional designs shown in
the earlier links should be possible using this approach.
- The Free Thinker, 2022
