Robotic Kitchen - Noodle Shop of the Future in Japan

Hey guys, welcome back. Today we have come to the Tokyo Big Sight to check out the world's first kitchen that's run by robots. So you might have seen our video a few months ago which featured an ice cream serving dinosaur robot made by Connective Robotics. But this is gonna take things to a whole new level. Yeah, so I heard this restaurant runs everything by itself including preparing meals, doing dishes and receiving payments. Sounds pretty futuristic. So I can't wait to go and see how it works. What Connective Robotics is demonstrating here is a fully automated kitchen system that will require only one human member of staff to be working alongside it at any one time. A series of robotic arms powered by some very clever AI software will take care of most of the hard work like cooking the meals and cleaning the dishes leaving the staff to focus on serving customers. So let's try placing an order. The arm over here picked up the raw soba put it into the little basket. And yeah, now we just have to wait for this arm to come over like this. It's gonna pick it up. It's gonna put it into the boiling water and shake it up a little bit. And then he grabs this one from over here and replaces the basket ready for the next batch. Okay, so noodles are done now. So we can take them out, drain them off a little bit. Then they're gonna go over to this sink over here to give it a little wash, give it a little drain and then it's gonna go into the other sink. It's got some cooler water in there to kind of contract the noodles and get them ready to eat. And final stop, they go over here ready for the staff just to serve them into the bowl, put some soup in there and they're ready to go. Yeah, so if I put the tray here, it's gonna automatically calculate the price including the topping. So let's see. Touch it. And yeah. That's 600 yen. So confirm. That's it. Ready to eat. Yeah, so now I'm gonna try the first ever robot made soba in my life. Oh, it's quite good. What I mean is, how do you say, the softness of soba, soba noodle, it's just perfect. You know, it's like precisely measured. So it's just nice. It's a lot better than I expected. Golden brown and fried to perfection, these kakiage are also machine made. Once lowered into the temperature controlled cooking oil, their time in the fry is precisely set down to the millisecond. When they're ready, the robotic arm swoops in to pull them out of the oil, drain them off and then set them aside for the staff to serve up to customers. Yeah, so I also got this robot made kakiage. Let's try. Also very good. Yeah, so now I'm with Sabanoboji-san, CEO of Connected Robotics. Yeah. Okay, so could you tell us a little bit about the concept of this robot restaurant? Okay, in Japan, restaurants have very long operation time and lack of labor is really a serious problem. And also working in restaurants is really exhausting and sometimes excruciating. So we'd like to help these people working in restaurants. And I also had experience because my grandparents had restaurants. I myself felt really this is tiring and hard work. Still, they have less wages compared to other jobs. So we want to contribute the wealth of restaurant workers as well as well-being of human society all over the world. And from the technical standpoint, what was the most challenging part when you're developing this system? Okay, so we have several things we challenged. One thing is that Japanese restaurants are especially very small and they have narrow space in kitchen. So we deployed robots very carefully and designed so that humans and robots wouldn't conflict or collide together. And the next thing is we use so-called AI, machine learning, and we make robots recognize dishes and noodles, food so that robot can adapt itself to work in the restaurant, recognizing these food and working according to the situation. So our vision is innovate the kitchen by robots. This is our vision. So in the end, we'd like to deploy our robots in worldwide and serve sushi, soba, ramen, such kind of good Japanese foods all over the world. Seeing these systems in action, it's easy to imagine how they could seamlessly be incorporated into our daily life in the future. And you never know, it probably won't be too long before you're served up a bowl of soba cooked with unmatchable precision by a robot. If you like this video, then please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to Japan Pro for brand new videos every single week. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you again in the next video.