Mechatronic Handling Solution for a Robotized Pizza-Chef Assistant

In the Industry 4.0 context, advanced mechatronic solutions are more and more adopted also outside the manufacturing field, e.g. food. Being pizza one of the most spread foods worldwide and since not all the tasks for preparing it need the dexterity of a pizza-chef, e.g. topping, an autonomous collaborative robot helping the pizza-chef would represent a possible and effective support solution. However, a crucial aspect in handling the ingredients for topping is the selection of a proper end-effector. Indeed, foodstuff is usually characterized by non-uniform shapes and dimensions as well as it is soft and/or fragile. As first step for conceiving and testing an intelligent (collaborative) robotic pizza topping system, this paper firstly investigates the commercially available low-cost grippers able to deal with foodstuff. Starting from this analysis, a versatile ad-hoc designed gripper able to handle most of the ingredient typically used for topping pizzas has been designed and tested.