Cheeseborg: The Grilled Cheese Making Robot

While making a grilled cheese sandwich is simple for humans, Mitchell Riek, Evan Hill, and Taylor Tabb built a robot to do it for them as part of a class at Carnegie Melon University. Things, of course, were more complicated with a robot involved!

The aptly named “Cheeseborg” acts as sort of an assembly line operation, and one of the biggest challenges with this system was handling the ingredients. While cheese presents a smooth surface, and bread is quite porous, gripping both was handled with a vacuum system, inspired by robotic manipulation of small electronics. A stack of bread is first lifted to a height that the vacuum can pick up, and is then rotated and dropped into a secondary position. The same is done with the cheese, and the assembled sandwich is then pushed onto a George Foreman-style grill. Butter is applied by first spraying the bottom of the grill surface, then a second spray is applied once the sandwich is present to coat the top. A second pusher mechanism then slides the sandwich into a slot, ready to be eaten.

Electronics are controlled by an Arduino Mega, along with a Raspberry Pi running Google Assistant. This allows the device to be activated by politely saying, “Hey Google, make me a grilled cheese please!” It’s a clever proof-of-concept, and hopefully earned these students an “A.” One could see a more mature form of this concept integrated into an entertaining vending machine, though keeping fresh (and uniform) bread and cheese on hand at all times would present a challenge!