Robot themed restaurant opened in Coimbatore

COIMBATORE: A concept seen in “Avengers” and other super hero movies and maybe in restaurants abroad has now come to Coimbatore. A group of five youngsters, who are passionate about theme-based restaurants, have opened a robot themed restaurant in the city.
Robots pick up the food from the kitchen and deliver it at the customer’s table. Customers can pick up the food from the tray.
The robot will also be able to detect someone blocking its way and request them to move out of their way.
“When one of our partners, Venkatesh, travelled abroad, robots served him at some restaurants in China and even Africa,” said Karthikeyan, one of the five partners of the restaurant. “He decided to bring the concept to India,” he said.

The youths, who were already running an aeroplane themed Chinese restaurant, began working on sourcing robots that could serve in restaurants and figuring out how to program and repair them.
“We finally sourced them from a company abroad. Venkatesh then went to the company and spent some time learning to program them, operate them and even repair them,” said Karthikeyan.
“We started our first restaurant on the Old Mahabalipuram Road in Chennai around eight months ago and named it Robot Themed Restaurant. It was a success, and many of our customers who visited the restaurant wanted us to come to Coimbatore. So we began working on it,” he said.
The Coimbatore restaurant, which serves Chinese, Thai and Indian food, has eight robots. Customers can place their order on an iPad. The food prepared by chefs is then transferred to the tray held by robots and they are programmed to serve it at the specific table. However, servers are employed to serve the food from the robot’s tray to the customer’s plate.

“We decided to employ servers so that they can explain the names of the dishes to the customers because we have many varieties of breads, fried rice and gravies,” said Karthikeyan.
“Currently we have not been able to reduce staff strength because we have two people to operate the robots alone,” he said.
The robots cost around Rs 7 lakh each.