#CEATEC2018 – Restaurants that use robots to prepare food aren’t new, and it seems that over in Japan, convenience store chain Lawson plans to use them as well. Unveiled at CEATEC 2018, the company showed off a robot that had the ability to prepare dumplings according to the customer’s preferences.
Now from the video above, it is clear that while robots have advantages such as being more precise and not requiring any breaks, the speed at which they make dumplings certainly seems to be considerably slower than an experienced human. However the upside is that Lawson can help to save costs as they will not need to hire human workers, plus given that these stores typically operate 24 hours a day, it actually makes perfect sense to use robots.
We imagine that should this robot ever find its way to their stores, it should be improved upon in terms of speed, but otherwise it is still a pretty cool concept. Lawson actually has even bigger plans that go beyond dumpling making robots, and where they envision a future where they can create shops that are unattended.
A couple of years ago Lawson’s actually trialled a self-checkout system made by Panasonic, and the company hopes that they’ll be able to introduce such stores across Japan in 2025 onwards. Lawson isn’t alone in their idea of unattended stores. Amazon too has been testing out the idea of stores where customers can come in, shop, and leave without having to go through the checkout process.
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