Little Caesars was today issued a patent for a robot designed to help assemble pizzas, meaning life’s about to get a lot easier (or a lot harder, depending on your perspective) for hapless human cheese spreaders.
The patent shows a device shaped like a stove top, with stations for different pizza-making tasks. The robot picks up a pan with pizza dough, squishes it, and then distributes sauce, cheese, and pepperoni in the proper proportions.
According to the company’s explanation in the patent, the robot would free Little Caesars from the tedium of repetitive tasks and allow them to “perform other value added tasks.” Presumably that’s the same thinking that gave us Flippy, the burger-flipping robot.
It doesn’t appear to actually cook the pizzas or slice them, and the only listed topping is pepperoni — though it probably wouldn’t be hard to adapt it to other toppings. I’m sure there are only so many ways one can “properly distribute” pineapple or olives. Still, there are other robots already doing the things this particular one can’t — Zume Pizza in Silicon Valley, for example, can shape the dough and bake the pizzas at a rate of 372 an hour.
If Little Caesars were to ever combine their robot with Pizza Hut’s self-driving pizza delivery truck, the only human force we’ll ever need will be a single human to load the pizzas into the car. At least it’ll make the experience less embarrassing when you accidentally order one with your vibrator.
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