Amazing pancake sorting robot

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By Phillip Torrone
Posted 2009/09/28 @ 8:37 pm
Category Robotics

Wow! This robot sorts over 400 pancakes per minute. Right around 1:15 it gets amazing, it seems like it’s sped up, but they need to slow it down in the video to show it off! … via jk.

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15 Responses to Amazing pancake sorting robot

Steve Hoefer on September 29th, 2009 at 9:35 pm said:

I especially like the physical buffer where it can keep pancakes until they’re needed and how the contrasting blue belt helps the object recognition. It’s like a pick & place machine for food.

(Though the words “room temperature pancakes” makes me squirm and the idea of factory made pancakes hurts my brain.)

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Jack on September 29th, 2009 at 11:25 pm said:

Very interesting. Like Steve, I thought the physical buffer was a pretty nifty part of this robotic system.

It’s really amazing how quickly these things work, and how they can pick at such speeds without damaging the product. This is especially true of pancakes overlapped upon one another. I’d love to see more detail about how the actual picking up is done. Is it suction, or some other method?

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Miguel on September 29th, 2009 at 11:39 pm said:

I worked on this sort of equipment…
It is amazing…search youtube for parallel kinematics
and there’s a lot more. Note also how fast the machine vision system is working.

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Stuart on September 30th, 2009 at 12:48 am said:

I would like to work somewhere that pancakes per minute is a valid performance metric.

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mark on September 30th, 2009 at 3:05 am said:

mmm… pancake buffer

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Sylvain on September 30th, 2009 at 3:20 am said:

I agree that the robot arm is hygienic … but at the beginning we saw guys with bare hands putting pancakes on the tray before robot takes care of them ?!

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Irregular Shed on September 30th, 2009 at 4:59 am said:

At 2:30 in, the narrator uses the term “Final Solution”. Seeing fast robots and hearing a term like that sends a shiver down my spine…

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vincent on September 30th, 2009 at 6:02 am said:

At 1:35. I used Window XP too for my automation based project because it’s easier to integrate with vision and robotics arm. But i hope i can use Linux one day….

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Anonymous on September 30th, 2009 at 6:30 am said:

Let me be the first to welcome our new robotic pancake picker overlords.

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diypancakes on September 30th, 2009 at 6:35 am said:

i think this is cool technologically, but you have to realize that “reduced labor (labour) costs” probably means people lost their job to this robot…

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Carl on September 30th, 2009 at 6:47 am said:

How long until these superfast suction sorter robots are just punching holes in the skulls of the rounded up human refugees and sucking out our brains?

WAKE UP, PEOPLE!

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Doctor Allen on September 30th, 2009 at 7:58 am said:

First they came for the pancakes, and I said nothing because I was not a pancake.

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Rob Cruickshank on September 30th, 2009 at 10:52 am said:

I am never going to hear the term “stack overflow” again without picturing the pancake buffer.

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Jeroen on September 30th, 2009 at 1:17 pm said:

This is cool stuff!

I work on some slightly related technology: Machines that visually inspect a bulk product, such as fruit or vegetables, and removes items that are somehow defective (discolorations, deformed, texture etc). There are no cool moving robot arms like these, but the throughput is higher: Up to 50 metric tons an hour.

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Hodge on October 1st, 2009 at 9:28 am said:

Am I the only one who misread the headline as ‘pancake SNORTING robot’ and was subsequently disappointed?

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