The Moley Robotic Kitchen is a world-first: a fully integrated automated kitchen, designed for regular homes, that cooks with the skill and flair of a human chef.
It will create a paradigm shift in the use of robots in the home and have a major impact on health and wellbeing. Users will now be able to enjoy healthy, freshly cooked meals every day, with less effort than it takes to reheat a mass-produced ‘ready meal’ or order takeaway for delivery.
The World Health Organisation estimates that nearly 30% of the global population – over 2.1 billion people – are obese. One in 10 people in the Middle East and North Africa has diabetes, with the problem is particularly acute in UAE.
The causes of obesity are many but sedentary lifestyles, longer working hours and a correlating decrease in home cooking, means more of us eat processed food, more often.
Portion control and exercise are important counter-balances to obesity, but the key factor must be the type and quality of the food we consume. Eating freshly prepared meals, made with high-quality ingredients, as part of a balanced diet, is the cornerstone for a healthy lifestyle. The pace of modern life can make this seemingly simple proposition a real challenge.
The Moley Robotic Kitchen is uniquely able to address these challenges, harnessing world-class technology to make it easy for people to eat well, every day.
Two highly complex, fully articulated hands comprise the kitchen’s enabling technology. The product of over eighteen years’ research and development, they are used in research laboratories and by NASA. Able to faithfully reproduce the movements of a human hand, they give the Kitchen the capability to cook anything a human chef can.
This goes to the heart of the design philosophy underpinning this technology. The Moley Robotic Kitchen does not cook like a machine, it captures human skill in motion.
A motion-capture technique will be used to generate an ever-growing digital library of recipes for the Moley Kitchen to cook. Dishes by world-famous chefs and family favourites will be available for download. There will also be complete diets created by leading nutritionists, tailored to individual health needs. This will not only provide fantastic utility for the users, it will actively promote interest in high-quality food and international cuisine; as The Economist newspaper commentated: “the service will let a user select not only a dish but also its creator, in effect bringing a virtual version of a celebrity chef into the user’s house to cook it for him.”
Actions are translated into digital movement using bespoke algorithms created with the collaboration between Moley and teams from Shadow Robotics (UK), Universities of Stanford (USA) and The Sant-Anna School of Advanced Studies Pisa (Italy).
The design, by an international team including Sebastian Conran, DYSEGNO and the Yachtline company, is modern and attractive without being too ‘science fiction’ or unfamiliar. Being modular it can be configured to fit regular kitchen spaces in a wide variety of homes worldwide and the fitments (hob, sink, refrigerator, dishwasher) are of professional quality.
As the Moley Kitchen cooks perfectly every time, food waste will be reduced and, by providing a viable alternative to ready meals, it could also reduce our dependence on pre-packaged food: highly manufactured items requiring a great deal of energy intensive processing, packaging and transport.