Dishflipper: Development of a Large Food Debris Rinsing and Removal System Integration for Fully Automating Dish-Washing in a Pilot Soba Noodle Stand

摘要

This work presents a system integration designed for washing reusable dishes at a soba noodle restaurant. To address the need to manually rinse food debris and flip the dishes when in our previous system integration, we developed an add-on system that utilizes the Dishflipper mechanism mounted on an robot-arm, improving the overall capability of our system. Our proposed system integration is unique as it considers automating the removal of large food pieces initially left in the tableware using a cobot. The developed system integration has been shown effective in matching the workflow of a soba noodle stand, as demonstrated at the Hotels and Restaurant Show 2021 (HCJ) hosted in Tokyo. (Extended video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DcNNwO5h1I)