These Robots Are Making Meals for a Nonprofit in San Francisco’s Tenderloin Leave a comment

These potato-salad-slinging AI cooks aren’t taking anybody’s jobs. Not but, anyway. They’re simply right here as volunteers.

Undertaking Open Hand, a nonprofit based in 1985 by native grandmother and HIV-awareness advocate Ruth Brinker, prepares and packages meals to satisfy the various dietary necessities of people that want them. The hassle started in response to the AIDS disaster, however the nonprofit has since expanded the meals it makes for individuals with situations akin to coronary heart illness, diabetes, or continual kidney illness.

Nevertheless it takes many individuals to make these meals, and Undertaking Open Hand has struggled to entice volunteers to assist fill the meal kits. The group is housed in a four-story constructing in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Throughout peak hours, the place seems like an enormous operation, normally bustling with individuals. A few of them are there in want of the free meals, some are workers and volunteers there to make the meals and preserve the place operating.

The method of placing collectively medically tailor-made meal packing containers can get sophisticated. Totally different sufferers have completely different wants, so the meals that exit for donation can’t be one-size-fits-all and should account for allergy symptoms and nutrient necessities primarily based on individuals’s wants and medical situations. That’s the place the robots are available in.

“It is not even that they’re sooner,” says Alma Caceres, a sous chef who works on the meal prep course of at Undertaking Open Hand. “It’s that we do not have the volunteers.”

Chef Robotics is a San Francisco firm that makes “bodily AI for the meals trade.” It’s one of many many corporations centered on constructing robots that may higher deal with bodily objects. Chef’s automated robots focus particularly on plating—no cooking or chopping—simply the act of getting the meals on a plate at scale. It has purchasers for its robo-made meals, akin to Amy’s Kitchen and Issue, the frozen-meal firm. Chef Robotics can also be coaching its robots to finally deal with extra advanced duties, like assembling a hamburger piece by piece.

The partnership with Open Hand got here from an opportunity dialog between staff from the 2 organizations on the Bay Space Fast Transit. When introduced with the concept, Undertaking Open Hand’s CEO, Paul Hepfer, mentioned the price of renting the robots felt value it. (Sure, they pay a subscription charge.)

“Nonprofits usually function beneath a shortage mindset, and I feel that is a disservice to the individuals we serve, as a result of you then’re not in search of improvements or high quality enhancements,” Hepfer tells WIRED. “There’s not a complete lot of robots, AI, and innovation within the Tenderloin, I might wager.”