The Robotic Restaurant Revolution may not be here just yet—but it’s on its way.
From delivering food to flipping burgers to taking and filling orders, robots are finding their place in the restaurant industry.
Robotics startup Momentum Machines, currently at work on its first restaurant, recently received more than $18 million in venture funding.
Whether these automatons will trim payroll or provide enough of a gee-whiz element to drive traffic remains unknown. (Panera has said it had to “dramatically increase” staffing during the early days of its kiosk ordering program.) But that’s not stopping operators from launching robot-focused concepts.
Here’s a peek at three new concepts in which robots replace traditional bartenders and servers.