Tacos and bowls
A claw cannot pick up guacamole
Most of what goes in a bowl has no shape to grip. That single fact decides the whole machine.
Why this is a different problem
A pizza has one base and a burger has a stack. A bowl has eight loose things measured out into a container, and none of them can be picked up. Rice slumps, sauce runs, herbs stick to whatever touched them last.
So nothing here is a robot in the way people imagine. The machine is a row of dosers over a moving container, each releasing a measured amount, and the hard engineering is in the doser and not in any arm.
That is good news for cost. Dosers are cheap, they are old, and the record about them is thick. It is bad news for anybody hoping one machine will do everything, because each ingredient wants a slightly different one.
Portioning
What a gripper cannot do, a doser can
Weight per portion is the whole specification. Get it right and the waste line in the arithmetic falls hard, because portioning by eye is generous by eye and generous adds up across a service.
Each ingredient needs its own mechanism. A screw for rice, a piston for sauce, a vibrating tray for anything dry and light. Trying to run all of them through one design is the mistake that makes these lines expensive.
The choices
What decides the machine, ingredient by ingredient
The pattern is that the mechanism follows the physics of the filling, and not the other way round.
| Filling | What it does | What handles it |
|---|---|---|
| Rice and grains | Flows, but packs and bridges when cold | A screw feeder with a stirrer above it |
| Sauces and creams | Runs, drips, and strings between portions | A piston doser with a cut off nozzle |
| Chopped vegetables | Sticks to itself and to the surface | A belt with a scraper, not a hopper |
| Leaves and herbs | Light enough that weight is hard to measure | A vibrating tray, measured by volume |
| Shells and bases | Rigid but brittle | The one place a gripper is right |
The last row is the only one an arm belongs in, which is roughly the ratio across every food line we have read about.
Or write here
Three fields, and a person reads it
Name, an address we can answer to, and what you are trying to build. You get a reference back straight away.
What goes in your bowl?
List the fillings and we will tell you which ones are solved and which ones are still somebody's open problem.