US 5,172,328 · Granted 1992-12-15

The 1992 Robot Chef Patent That Tried to Automate Fast Food

Imagine a robotic arm that grabs raw chicken nuggets from a pile, places them on a hot grill, waits for them to cook, then pulls them off and stacks them in a warming station—all without a human touching anything. That's what this patent describes: a fully automated kitchen robot designed to cook french fries, chicken nuggets, fish filets, and burger patties in fast-food restaurants.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a complete robotic cooking system that combines a food dispensing station, a computerized robot arm with a special gripper tool, a clamshell grill that opens and closes, and a cooked-food storage area. What's protected here is the specific arrangement of how the robot retrieves raw food in predetermined patterns, deposits it onto the grill, monitors cooking, retrieves the cooked product, and delivers it to storage—all coordinated by a central computer that controls timing based on expected customer demand.

Why it matters

This patent represents an early attempt to solve the labor shortage and consistency problems in fast-food kitchens through full automation. Rather than hiring and training kitchen staff, a restaurant could theoretically run the entire cooking operation with a single machine and computer system. The patent was filed in the early 1990s when robotics and computer control were becoming more affordable, making this a forward-looking vision of industrial food preparation that challenged how quick-service restaurants operated.

Real-world use

Every time you order chicken nuggets at a fast-food drive-through and they arrive piping hot in seconds, you're benefiting from the kind of industrial cooking choreography this patent pioneered—though most restaurants today use simpler automated fryers rather than full robotic systems.

Original USPTO abstract

A fully automated robotized system and method is provided for cooking food products. The system and method is especially useful for use in a quick service or fast food restaurant and, in one embodiment, is capable of cooking, on a fully automated basis, french fries, chicken nuggets, fish filets and chicken patties. In one embodiment, the system includes a robot, a bulk uncooked food dispensing station, a cooking station and a cooked food storage station. The system can be controlled by a computer operating and control station that controls and directs the robot to obtain bulk food from the dispensing station, place it in cooking position at the cooking station and when cooked, remove the food and deliver it to the storage station, at a rate required to fill anticipated customer orders. In one embodiment, the cooking station is a clamshell grill and the robot deposits on and retrieves from the grill hamburger patties in a predetermined horizontal array with a novel end of arm tool.

Patent details

Publication number: US 5,172,328
Filing date: 1992-01-08
Grant date: 1992-12-15
Assignee: Restaurant Technology, Inc.
Inventor(s): CAHLANDER; ROBERT L., CARROLL; DAVID W., HANSON; ROBERT A., HOLLINGSWORTH; ALFRED C., KOEHLER; RICHARD O., REINERTSEN; JOHN O.
CPC class: G07F17/0085

View original record on Google Patents →

Want to file your own patent?

If you're dreaming up your own kitchen gadget or restaurant automation idea, our free patentability scanner can help you spot what's already locked down before you build your prototype.

Free patentability scan