Towards Foodservice Robotics: A Taxonomy of Actions of Foodservice Workers and a Critical Review of Supportive Technology

Foodservice workers perform several burdensome, tedious, and unsafe tasks that risk their health and well-being. This could be mitigated or even more avoided by using autonomously-actuated machines. Therefore, this article aims to build the foundation to support the development of a new field of robotics research dedicated to foodservice and with a human/worker-centered framework. As so, we introduce a two-level taxonomy of basic actions that compose the physical tasks of foodservice workers; it can guide future studies to design bio-inspired control models for foodservice robots. Actions are clustered in 16 categories according to their purpose and to the handled food. Furthermore, authors make a critical review of single-action equipment (SAE) and advanced equipment (AE) currently available for foodservice, which allowed us to identify opportunities for research. As a result, authors found some categories of actions rarely automated, aimed at i) separating solid-solid food parts, ii) moving food between workstations or independent appliances in the kitchen, iii) introducing food into another solid food or recipient, and iv) other specific actions, e.g. trussing food. In addition, authors discuss the applicability of collaborative robotics and human-robot collaboration to different contexts in foodservice, and show how artificial intelligence is improving the capabilities of SAE and AE and what else it could improve in this context.