LIQUID KITCHEN

Automated food manufacture is one of my dreams, both from the 
perspective of someone who is too lazy to like cooking for himself 
(yet too cheap/rural to eat out), and someone who likes the idea of 
the catering/restaurant industry (their product is always in 
demand) if only it had higher margins and less human contact.

It's not a new idea:
https://hackaday.com/2015/06/09/retrotechtacular-automatic-for-the-people/
https://hackaday.com/2018/10/11/i-ate-a-robot-hamburger-before-the-restaurant-went-out-of-business/

But somehow it never seems to have taken off. My guess, reflected 
in that first article and the few comments to it not going off on a 
racism tangent, is that the problem is the cleaning of the 
equipment used to process the food.

Handling all the solid, yet soft, ingredients with machines is 
tricky without getting bits of food stuck in the mechanisms, then 
requiring the whole machine to be completely disassembled to clean 
everything. By using humans you never have to assemble the 
implements in the first place, so they are easy to clean and the 
humans take care of their own hygine themselves (theoretically at 
least).

My concept removes the element of direct contact with implements. 
Ingredients are introduced into a tank filled with a liquid (water, 
cooking oil) or pressurised gasses, then transducers acting on the 
liquid cause the movement of the ingredients through currents or 
pressure waves. The liquid is heated for cooking, or if a gas is 
used, IR or microwave heating is possible, and a CO2 laser beam 
directed by a mirror-galvanometer can be used for slicing.

The completed food item is directed into an air-lock, from which it 
can be removed by the customer. Cleaning is reduced simply to the 
task of cleaning the tank, largely acheived by flushing the 
liquid/gas, and then conventional automated sterilisation 
techniques could easily be applied to cleaning the tank surface. 
All transducer, etc., mechanisms would be sealed from the tank 
interior, so need no cleaning.

High-power transducers have been demonstrated manipulating tiny 
objects in air. Presumably larger weights can be manipulated within 
more dense substances. Water currents have much more strength - can 
these be controlled through IR or microwave heating alone? There 
are lots of complicated details to work out with this concept, but 
I think it could work quite well with enough refinement of the 
design. There's also no need to dedicate a separate piece of 
machinery to each ingredient, except for releasing it into the 
tank, so smaller machines than the conventional designs shown in 
the earlier links should be possible using this approach.

 - The Free Thinker, 2022