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Posted by hipstomp | 30 Mar 2011
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Comments (9)
Making the blog rounds is video of this robotic spatula:
So what is it?
It's a factory robot put out by Japanese company Furukawa and called SWITR, which actually stands for Special World Idea Technology Revolution (Japanese L/R ambivalence accounts for the discrepancy). It was apparently designed to process dough and perform those delicate tasks that only human hands could do. Information is light, though there's footage of the production-line unit here and another video below of the single-portion unit, which dates back to 2007.
What we're dying to know is what type of non-stick material the blade surface is coated with, but it's a trade secret, of course.
Comments
It doesn't look like it operates so much on the "spatula" principles everyone is so familiar with.
Just from the video observation I believe the unit is a thin sheet stretched over a more traditional scraper. The sheet slides over the scraper as it extends and retracts lifting the material onto the unit in a rolling motion, more like a micro conveyor belt than a scraper.
Give aways include: lack of inertial motion in the gels, thickness of the "scraper", lack of gel pushing by scraper lip.
Great manufacturing tool for jellies, but significantly more complicated than I think the writer assumed.
I still can't figure out how it picks up the entire mass without leaving any behind. Is the jelly attracted to the spatula somehow?
Very interesting. The trick is not so much the non-stick material though. The tray that shoots out is actually a thin film belt. As the tray extends the belt rolls from below the tray, around the leading edge, and back along its length. The belt picks up whatever gunk it encounters at the leading edge and moves it back at the same speed the tray extends so that there is no push force to deform the material.
Me thinks Wade and Andrew (above) have it right. Moreover, most cohesive mass of foods/materials are unable to bend to the thin radius that the "conveyor belt" wraps around at the tip of the spatula- its easier for that mass to stay cohesive during "departure" from the spatula.
-I might also venture to say that the thin belt on the spatula is likely teflon, or some other low-surface-energy material. Might also be the case that the "spatula" is being vibrated at a high frequency to provide an ultra low-friction surface. ;)
if the material was that much slippery, than food should not stand on spatula when it is angled.
it is working like this, not about material.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keX1-65rrLE&NR=1
trade secret my ass.
mehmet you a are right that is how this works.
+1 for conveyer belt theory
+1 for high frequency vibration
and!
+1 for LSE (low surface energy) material - as the video provider doesnt show anything other than a similarly colored and lit (=same?) surface and blade.
I agree with the guys above - very interesting theories/approaches to doing something like this.
Commercial bakeries have used a similar principle for decades to move sticky dough into the oven-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivd5Pe-oK9s