Robot Interface for Collaboration in Kitchen

For 3–4 years, the team shipped without a product or design owner. As the company prepared the next version, I proposed and led a redesign of robot interaction, working with the industrial designer and engineers through implementation.

Commercial kitchens move fast and AlphaGrill automates one task: grilling patties. The bot cooks and unloads patties in a few minutes, letting one line cook manage the grill line alongside other tasks. The redesign had to hold up when chefs are busiest.

Two decisions anchored the redesign:

Showing readiness, not temperature1 Chefs didn't want to know the current temperature — they wanted to know when the robot would be ready. I replaced numeric readings with a circular gauge showing degrees remaining, matching the question they were actually asking.

Tapping instead of swiping2 Swipe-based recipe selection failed often with oily gloved hands. Tap won on reliability. Swipe requires recognizing both position and direction; tap needs only position — which lowers both the time per action and the failure rate.

Kitchen robots need regular cleaning, but the original AlphaGrill wasn't designed for it — some surfaces were unreachable, others unsafe. Incomplete cleaning led to burnt-on buildup and component damage, a major source of repair costs and reliability loss.

"We all clean the kitchen together at closing time." — Site visit interview

The reframe: cleaning already happens at closing. The opportunity wasn't to enforce it, but to fold it into that existing routine.

Three findings from research shaped the newly added cleaning mode:

• Low-visibility surfaces were the ones being easily skipped.
• Kitchen staff were pouring water on hot griddles, causing deformation.
• Staff were reluctant to handle the hot grill parts, leading them to skip cleaning.

Cleaning mode runs in parallel with closing tasks3 Entering the mode starts a cooldown, so staff can keep working while the robot prepares — and gating cleaning behind the cooldown steers them away from pouring water on a still-hot grill.

Staff choose a cleaning position to reach hidden surfaces4 Three areas need the most careful cleaning — inner wall, griddle surface, and underside. Surfacing them in the UI prompts extra attention, and the robot moves into the selected position so staff don't shift hot, heavy parts by hand.

Pre-launch, validation came through internal dogfooding and demos with three major burger franchise partners. Staff followed the new flows without external guidance, and unprompted feedback specifically named the cleaning flow as intuitive and the readiness display as useful for managing parallel tasks.

As of May 2026, the new AlphaGrill is in pre-sale and contract discussions with major franchise partners are underway.