By bizn_fun 
The makers of a new robot arm for the cake industry are hoping to bridge that gap between speed and tradition.
Canada’s Unifiller, part of Coperion a big maker of equipment for food production, spent years developing a robot arm, called HIRO.
It’s designed to decorate cakes and can handle all sorts of toppings, including caramel.
“If you can squeeze it through a pastry bag… then it will go through our equipment and the the decorating tips,” says Derek Lanoville, the research and development manager at Coperion.
But making equipment for the food industry involves extra challenges – perhaps the biggest being hygiene.
“You have to make things easy to take apart, so that people clean them. The bottom line is, if it’s not easy to take apart, you don’t clean it.”
Unifiller’s robot arm comes from Swiss robotics firm Stäubli, which could supply an arm that’s easy to clean.
Another complication is the variability of food products like cakes.
On production lines in most industries components will be the same size, often to within fractions of a millimetre. That’s not the case in baking, where the cakes rolling down a line will be different – not by much – but enough,perhaps, to upset a robot.
“The cake may not be perfectly centred on the cardboard it’s sitting on. It may be a little bit oval, may be a little bit higher or slightly domed. So, our solution has to accommodate that,” says Mr Lanoville.