Hamburger Robot
I worked on a hamburger robot for a restaurant called Creator. The robot takes in fresh raw ingredients like chuck, tomatoes, onions, pickles, buns, etc. and creates a customized burger for the customer. Here’s a link to their website: creator.rest. The photo above is of one of the two robots currently in the restaurant. Most of my focus was on the next generation robot, which had the goal of being faster, more reliable, and easier to scale up for mass production.
At Creator I worked as part of the Conveyance team, which was responsible for slicing and toasting the buns as well as moving the box along the bottom of the machine and collecting all of the cooked and sliced ingredients for the burger. My main focus was on the next generation conveyor and what we called the “tray,” which is the mechanism that moves the orders off of the machine to a storage area where the restaurant staff can pick them up.
In order to achieve the goal of making the robot faster and more ready for mass production, I succeeded in making an architectural change to the overall robot that allows the conveyor to be simpler by an order of magnitude (the new conveyor has 1/10th the total parts as the current one) and for the burger production time to drop 16%.
As the owner of the architectural change, I built up a “skeleton” of reference geometry in CATIA that allowed the team working on the next-gen robot to build a highly flexible and robust design using top down methods. I then used this skeleton to design the frame and worked closely with our vendor to set and hit tolerances that are crucial for the assembly of the machine. The frame is huge, over 14ft long and 4 ft deep!
As the lead architect of the robot, and with the experience of designing the frame under my belt, I became the resident expert of CATIA at Creator.
Because the conveyor is the only mechanism on the robot that directly interacts with other systems, I also had the role of systems engineer. I organized discussions with the other teams (Protein, and Toppings) to make sure that the box would be placed at the right place with the correct timing, so each team could meet their culinary requirements.
The end of the conveyor, where the cheese melter, conveyor, seasoner and patty drop-off all interact, was the biggest challenge. When designing how all these systems interact, I created timing charts to make sure they all had enough time to complete their tasks and then passed these charts on to the Robot Software team to help with their logic.
