Development of a food handling gripper considering an appetizing presentation

In recent years, industrial robots have been applied to food production because of its huge potential market. Although cooking large amount of foods are done by specially designed cooking machines, dishing up the cooked foods remains as a labor-intensive task. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a new food handling gripper which is suitable for lunch box setout considering appetizing shape of presentation. A two degree-of-freedom multi-fingered gripper with a sliding push part was developed, and evaluated by grasping experiments with noodles and simmered foods. The gripper could put the food with a circular cone shape and control the amount of grasped food.