Yeah, whatever, R2-D2, you may have helped save a galaxy far far away, but can you make a pizza pie right away?
Nope.
But this rolling pizza machine made by a bunch of rocket scientists can.
Equipped with a $300,000 robotic invention that can make all sorts of pizzas in less than five minutes with no human hands involved in the cooking process, Stellar Pizza is hoping to roll out its first pie truck in the South Bay next spring.
“It’s exciting to have a robot out there, and it’s a very, very complicated machine able to make a delicious product,” said Benson Tsai, a former SpaceX engineer who is the co-founder and chief executive officer of the rolling robotic restaurant.
The new pizza robot will eventually travel around the L.A. area in an approximately 30-foot-long red truck that will dwarf most other food trucks.
And the room is needed, too, because this pizza chef isn’t really a cute little robot sporting a white hat and rolling dough with little titanium arms. Instead, it’s more like an 18,000-pound conveyor belt contraption that will be housed in the back of the truck as it takes raw dough, flattens it, pours on the toppings and throws it in the oven where a human will then serve it to customers.
“We didn’t design two robot arms throwing pizza dough in the air, that’s not really efficient, although doable,” Tsai said while he showed off the machine from the company’s Hawthorne headquarters.
Stellar Pizza was founded by Tsai and fellow former SpaceX engineers Brian Langone and James Wahawisan.
Their invention begins its kitchen shift by taking a raw dough ball from a refrigerator with a robotic tray that then flips it under a presser that flattens it into a pie. With a conveyor belt-type of device it’s moved under another part of the machine that drops sauce and cheese on the dough.
If you order a pepperoni pizza it will be moved under pepperoni that’s sliced on the spot above the pizza. Then there are several metal tubes the pizza can pass under that can drop toppings including green peppers, olives and sausage on the pie.
The pizza, which starts at $7 for a plain cheese pie, is then rolled out of the temperature-controlled toppings section of the machine where it is picked up by another robotic tray and slid into one of four ovens. It’s taken out of the oven by the same metal arm tray the same way and you got a pizza pie.
Once the truck rolls out, Tsai plans on showing the entire process via a flat screen on the truck so hungry customers can watch their robotic chef in action.
For information, visit eatstellarpizza.com
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