The world’s first fully robotic kitchen
Background story
This project has been with us since the very foundation of Wimble, and even a little bit before. Moley Robotics is developing a robotic kitchen that can automatically cook you any dish from the world's best chefs, and they reached out to us with the task of designing and implementing a futuristic interface for their kitchen.
Moley Kitchen made some noise a few years before our cooperation, and to be fair, the following articles would describe the whole thing way better than we would:
The robot chefs that can cook your Christmas dinner
By Kitti Palmai and Will Smale Business reporters
The robot kitchen that will make you dinner – and wash up too
By Rupert Neate
Wealth correspondent
Meet The Robot Chef That Can Prepare Your Dinner
By Megan Gibson
Tech / Innovation
Everything should be expensive, rich, and look like it fits within a hotel in outer space.
It was almost a direct speech from the customer. Well, let's get started...
The concept
The interface was developed for a 40-inch touch screen, and it took us more than 3 months just to approve the first design concept. The longest concept approval period we've ever had... There were a lot of options. The idea of having a circular menu was accepted fairly quickly, but everything else became quite a challenge.
The circular menu was convenient, but a single circular menu on a 40" screen looked small and lonely, and there was an idea: why not cram the rendering of the kitchen itself on the screen? 1) It solves the issue of filling the screen; 2) It turned out to be really convenient.
A couple more options, and voila...
On the screen, there is a virtual copy of the kitchen, which reproduces every action that happens in the physical kitchen.
It is possible to work with the virtual kitchen directly from the screen—to see what ingredients are in storage, where the pan or pot is, and all of that the kitchen sees and recognizes with the help of the video camera's system. It also displays sensors from the cooker, tap, and oven. It's pretty cool.
The lower part of the screen was reserved for notifications and quick access to processes in real time, something like minimized tasks in operating systems.
Prototypes and documentation
The document that was given to us was 40 pages, and the document that we wrote in the process of work reached 60
Menu
Cooking
Administration
Kitchen
the Kitchen / Robot
Recipe
for Cooking
Bluetooth Devices to the Kitchen
There were really a lot of use cases, and each one was a little challenge for us. For example, let's look at the use case of working with refrigerators in a virtual kitchen:
A case study of working with storage in a virtual kitchen
The user comes home with plenty of groceries and wants to organize them inside the storage (so the kitchen knows where they are and is ready to do the magic).
They take the container(s) out of the storage, add an ingredient(s), weigh it (with built-in weighs), put it back (the kitchen automatically recognizes which container was put back and connects the weigh it remembered earlier), select an ingredient on the screen, and... done.
If it sounds too complicated for you, here’s a lil scheme to help you figure the flow out:
We hope it’s clearer to you now.
Some more user flows
Schedule cooking
Recipe preparation
Searching recipes and recipes details
Voice control
During the early stages of the design process, it was clear enough that voice control would make the work with the kitchen substantially easier, so right after the interface was done, we moved to VUI (Voice User Interface).
It was the first time we were building VUI, and to be honest, we had no idea how it works from the inside. After days of research, we've stumbled across the USR prototyping system, which basically describes user-system dialogue with cards containing three fields: user utterance, situation, and system response.
[Adding ingredient flow]
Helper
Happy Path
Different order
Refill
We were intended to put all of the designed cards next, but it looked too boring and felt almost endless all-in-all. Trust us, enough is enough...
Development
We had a choice between Unity and QT technologies. Unity was gaining momentum; there were (and still are, haha) many developers, and more are expected. A good choice, we thought...
And so we had the first version done for CES 2021. We did it in just under 6 months; all the basic functionality for the presentation was developed and tested.
They sent us a touch-screen all the way from the UK to Ukraine, so we were able to do proper testing. Everybody was super excited.
Further down, there is a video presentation from CES 2021.
And after CES, we've had to add the rest of the features, and here the bugs were waiting for us. They were breeding faster than rabbits...
When it all went wrong
Crooked back-end integration, lack of libraries, Unity turned out to be not as mature and stable as expected, low performance... We could write a lot, but in short, the next year of work was hell; we had to stop, so we did. We didn't switch to QT, nor did we continue working... We parted ways with the client amicably.
The conclusion
It was a unique experience; we love that kind of thing. It was a crazy customer; we love that kind of thing. It was technical debt; we didn't even know the term when we already had it.
team:
Project Management
Andriy LabunskiyUI/UX Design
Serge Suhanov Alexey Evdokimov Petro Ivanchenko3D graphics
Alexey EvdokimovUnity development
Maxim Mikhnevich Alexander KotovschikovQ&A and Testing
Volodymir Beseda
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