Automated Pancake Cooking System
Over the summer, my grandfather and I designed a system to extrude pancake batter, flip pancakes, and serve them fully automatically. We achieved this using a gantry system and a robotic arm.
The extruder consists of a large nozzle and a stopper connected to a spring solenoid system. It opens and closes with a peristaltic pump to unleash a consistent amount of pancake batter from a reservoir. This nozzle is mounted on top of a c-beam aluminium gantry and is connected to a stepper motor, which allows it to move back and forth above a hot plate which can cook the pancakes. The program which governs this system takes in a number of desired pancakes, and spreads them out evenly across the platform, using as little space as possible. Currently, the system in place uses a large amount of spacing to ensure no conjoined pancakes are formed. A video of this setup is below.
The flipping aspect of this project consists of a Dobot Magician robotic arm on top of a custom-made c-beam linear actuator, using a custom-made end effector, the most important aspects of which are a servo motor and a walled spatula. The linear actuator consists of a 3D-printed stepper motor bracket, tensioner bracket, and a base to slot the Dobot Magician onto. In addition, the servo bracket was initially made up of two servo motors, one to flip the spatula and one to lift it, similar to the pronation and supination of a wrist. It was decided that the second servo motor was superfluous to the design and would only be used in a future project where airborne flipping was a part of the design scope.
Other future additions to this project include a vision system to detect where to slide the spatula to lift a pancake optimally. The two separate systems that control the extruder and flipper systems will also need to be combined.
A video of the final flipper setup is below.
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