10:27 28 February 2017
The Huis Ten Bosch, a Japanese amusement park in Nagasaki, Japan features a restaurant staffed by robot employees with oknomiyaki flipping bot being the star of the show.
The humanoid chef has been programmed to coat a griddle with oil, mix the batter, and flip pancakes before completing the dish with mayonnaise and dried green seaweed.
This attraction is a building off of the Dutch-themed park Huis Ten Bosch’s smart hotel. The futuristic hotel has 72 rooms, three customer service robots, and one ‘service bot’ that serves guests coffee.
In July 2016, the themed park opened the Henn-na Restaurant, a buffet style establishment where food is prepare by robots. It also features autonomous bartenders and serving robots that wait on guests. The robot restaurant is a part of an experiment to identify the parts of an industrial kitchen that can be automated. However, a number of human employees are present in the facility to take over if there are any issues that robots cannot handle.
All the robots in the facility use technology from Yaskawa Electric, which was designed for grabbing and carrying parts in factories.