If you have a lot of money to spend on something, London’s W1 is the place to be. Within minutes you can visit the most expensive private doctor in the city, buy a Steinway and a pair of designer glasses that cost more than my mortgage.
Wigmore Street is also where rich people go to buy a kitchen that would make Thorstein Veblen weep. It’s also the new home of Moley Robotics, a company selling luxury kitchens and a robot arm that will do the cooking for you.
Moley is the brainchild of Dr. Mark Olenick and is one part kitchen showroom and one part robot lab. It’s a simple space, with three demo kitchens, a wide dining table and a few display units showing you different types of artisan marble for your countertop.
The most interesting thing is the X-AiR robot working right behind the front window, which works to entice potential consumers. It has its own cooktop, cabinets, oil and utensils and can even cook meals with the proper help.
Mollie
Olenick said he wanted to create something that would help people eat better and rely less on preservatives. He didn’t like reheated and processed food, so he started looking for alternatives, which led him to finding a way to cook fresh food. If you’re coming home from work late, obviously microwave cooking or getting delivery food is your best option.
He believes people will prefer healthier recipes where you just prepare the raw ingredients and let the robot do the rest. The focus on health extends to the database of potential meals, many of which are created by the SHA Wellness Clinic.
Mollie has its own in-house chef, James Taylor, who prepares each recipe so it can be made by a one-arm robot. The company says it hopes to add two or three new recipes each month, and if you have a family dish you’d like to see automated, you can send it in.
Olenick said the movements on the robot are mapped after watching a human chef prepare the same meal. And, once it learns what to do, the robot will be much less error-prone than its human counterpart.
An early demonstration of Moley’s vision (above) used a two-handed chef that moved on an overhead track, which brought the company a lot of praise early on.
Unfortunately, Olenick admitted that such a robot would likely cost more than £250,000 (about $330,000). Which is probably too much even for those who frequent Wigmore Street for their kitchen tools.
To bring the price down, the company downsized the project from a mobile, two-handed version to a one-handed version. The robot that Moley is selling is purchased from an industrial robotics company called Universal Robots.
The robot
The one-arm version available for pre-order right now is known as the X-AiR, which is placed in front of Moley’s showroom. If you want one for yourself, you’ll need to buy a new countertop, two custom shelving units, a cooktop, the control tablet, and the robot itself.
Prices are in the “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” range, but the price to buy one is £80,000 (about $105,000).
So far, Moley hasn’t installed a single robot, but hopes to begin that process in the next three to six months. But there are people who have already spent money to put one of these robots in their kitchens and around their homes.
The X-AiR doesn’t have any built-in vision or sensing technology that enables it to understand or connect with its environment. The system has a camera mounted on one of the shelves, which I assume is more for technical support than to assist with cooking.
Instead, the robot’s arm rotates to its location from memory, knowing where all the ingredients, oil, and tools should be. Saucepans are placed above the jobs on the cooktop to keep the environment as controlled as possible.
I was on hand to watch Moly’s now standard demonstration using a SHA Clinic recipe for Asian tofu sauté. Staff members had prepped the ingredients and placed them in the utensils the robot needed.
To start the process, the user has to tell the system which ingredients are in which section.
There’s also a little diagram of the shelf layout, so you can tap on “bean sprouts” and tap that the vessel with them is sitting in the A1 position, for example. Once you’ve done that, you can turn the machine on and theoretically leave it running until it’s time to eat.