The Robot Pizza Maker

The pizza robot tells a super original and fun story. This is how a mix of IT, robotics and culinary culture can give life to an example of super itech innovation.

Unlike humans, the pizza robot can handle an unlimited amount of dough and toppings. You just tell him what kind or how many people want their cake!

Some say that robots will one day take over our jobs because they are so efficient at things like cooking food and working quickly without errors - and I'm not sure why anyone would object if that happened (I'm only half joking). What do you think?

The pizza robot is a machine that can make your favorite pizzas in minutes.
Well, not yet - the technology isn't perfect and sometimes it takes multiple tries to get them right!

The pizza robot: this is who he is

The ingredients of this incredible story are three: Naples, the pizza and the robotics. Ingredients which, when well mixed, created RoDyMan, the pizza robot.

It all began in the Prisma Lab, the robotics laboratory of the Federico II University of Naples. Here a team of engineers led by prof. Bruno Siciliano orders a pizza and has an intuition: to build the pizza robot capable of manipulating elastic, malleable objects. Like the pizza dough our engineers were biting into.

And beyond kneading the RoDyMan pizza, the pizza chef robot, represents a real evolutionary stage in robotics. And not only because his fluid movements abandon the traditional rigidity of robots, but also because his ability could be exploited in many other manual professions, even in the healthcare sector (think of futuristic robot surgeons).

Will an army of RoDyMan, the pizza chef robot, definitively take the place of human workers?

Prof. Siciliano assures us that RoDyMan does not intend to replace man so much as to support him in certain activities. Not even real pizza chefs currently seem particularly worried about RoDyMan, in fact they doubt that a sequence of robotic movements, resulting from algorithms, can replace the art of human pizza chefs, which instead arises from emotion. And from that passion that seems to flow through their veins like the magma of Vesuvius. "You won't believe it but every pizza has a soul" says Gino Sorbillo, the best-known pizza chef in Naples, "a soul that changes from dough to dough". And, for the moment, the kilometre-long queues outside his restaurant as well as the 150,000 people employed in the catering sector give Sorbillo and his fellow chefs hope.

However, the centuries-old art of pizza seems to have also been passed down to RoDyMan, whose movements are modeled on those of pizza chef Enzo Coccia, another industry veteran. In fact, sensors have been applied to the chef which allow every movement to be transmitted onto a screen called an avatar. From this screen, which acts as a "mind" for RoDyMan, the robot memorizes them. And, as the professor predicts. Sicilian, this year the robot pizza chef will have nothing to envy of his flesh-and-blood "colleagues", so much so that he will be able to show off his skills at the Pizza Festival in May 2018. There, under the incredulous eyes of visitors, he will cook pizzas without skipping any preparation phase, starting from the dough and arriving at cooking.

However, how much did RoDyMan cost?

Prof. Siciliano does not hide an expense amounting to hundreds of thousands of euros, which however was rewarded with a loan of two million which allowed the Prisma Lab of the Federico II University of Naples to recruit doctoral fellows from universities all over the world. A nice reversal of trend compared to Italian graduates who go abroad, which fills the professor with pride. Sicilian and the Neapolitan university.

https://youtu.be/O4hrpZJTeZU

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