Armstrong Robotics wants to create general purpose kitchen robots, starting with dishwashing - The Robot Report

Armstrong Robotics, a San Francisco-based startup, is developing general-purpose kitchen robots with an initial focus on automating dishwashing in restaurants. Co-founder and CEO Axel Hansen highlights dishwashing as a universally disliked and labor-intensive task that restaurants struggle to staff, making it an ideal candidate for robotic automation. Unlike simpler kitchen tasks such as frying or flipping burgers, which offer limited value for automation investment, dishwashing involves significant workload and cost, especially in full-service restaurants. Armstrong’s system employs three off-the-shelf robot arms equipped with specialized grippers, and after five years of R&D, the company is now operating its dishwashing robots in multiple restaurants around the clock, autonomously cleaning thousands of dishes. A major technical challenge Armstrong faced was the perception problem—accurately detecting and locating dirty dishes made of various materials like glass and shiny metal, often covered with grease or liquids. To address this, the robot uses 30 sensors and a neural network trained on millions of dish images to achieve millimeter