Pizza maker robot. The ingredients of this incredible story are three: Naples, pizza and robotics. Ingredients that are well blended, have created RoDyMan, the first robot-pizza maker.
Why pizza is so important?
Pizza was introduced to Naples by Greek immigrants who had learned to cook while working abroad; this simple meal became popular throughout southern Italy thanks to its great culture that allowed innovation and adaptation with whatever ingredients were available in every region where they lived.
Pizza was originally an easy food to prepare for those who couldn’t afford better. It is recorded that, during this period of time between 500′ and 600′, became common practice in Italy and Naples in particular because of a significant rate of poverty among the citizens of the time that led them to stuff the pizza with fantasies little elaborate such as chicken or veal; however a dish holds its fame – the “Pizzaiola” (Neapolitan). Traditionally composed mostly of flour paste and seasoned with locally grown tomatoes along with other vegetables, including mozzarella.
Pizza maker robot
It all started in the Prisma Lab, a laboratory of robotics at the Federico II University of Naples. Here is a team of engineers led by prof. Bruno Siciliano orders a pizza and has an intuition: to build a robot able to handle elastic, malleable objects. Like the pizza dough our engineers were snapping.
And beyond the pizza RoDyMan, a.k.a. “The robot pizza maker”, represents a real evolutionary stage in robotics. And not only that because its fluid movements abandon the traditional rigidity of the robots, but also because its ability could be exploited in many other manual professions, even in healthcare (think of futuristic robot-surgeons).
Pizza maker robot
With an army of RoDyMan can definitively take the place of human workers? The professor. Siciliano assures that RoDyMan does not intend to replace man as much as to support him in certain activities. Not even meat-and-bone pizza makers, at present, seem to be particularly worried by RoDyMan, in fact they doubt that a sequence of robotic movements, triggered by algorithms, can replace the art of human pizza makers, born instead of emotion.
Pizza maker robot
And from that passion that seems to flow in their veins like the magma of Vesuvius. “You will not believe it but every pizza has a soul” says Gino Sorbillo, the best known pizza maker of Naples “a soul that changes from dough to dough”. And, for the moment, the queues that are miles away from its premises as well as the 150,000 employees in the catering sector hope for Sorbillo and his fellow chefs.
Pizza maker robot
However, the age-old art of pizza seems to have been handed down to RoDyMan, whose movements are modeled on those of the pizza maker Enzo Coccia, another veteran of the sector. Sensors have been applied to the chef to transmit every movement on a screen called an avatar.
From this screen, which acts as a “mind” for RoDyMan, the robot stores them. And, as foreseen by prof. Sicilian, this year the robot pizza maker will have nothing to envy to his “colleagues” in the flesh, so much so that he can show off his skills at the Pizza Festival in May 2018. There, under the eyes of disbelieving visitors , will cook pizzas without skipping any preparation phase, starting from the dough and cooking.
Pizza maker robot
Pizza maker robot
However, how much did RoDyMan costs? The professor. Siciliano does not hide a cost of hundreds of thousands of euros, which however has been rewarded with a loan of two million that has allowed the Prisma Lab of the University Federico II of Naples to recruit doctoral scholarship holders from universities all over the world. A beautiful trend reversal compared to Italian graduates who go abroad, which fills the prof. Sicilian and the Neapolitan university.