Making the blog rounds is video of this robotic spatula:
So what is it?It's a factory robot put out by Japanese company Furukawa and called SWITR, which actually stands for Special World Idea Technology Revolution (Japanese L/R ambivalence accounts for the discrepancy). It was apparently designed to process dough and perform those delicate tasks that only human hands could do. Information is light, though there's footage of the production-line unit here and another video below of the single-portion unit, which dates back to 2007.
What we're dying to know is what type of non-stick material the blade surface is coated with, but it's a trade secret, of course.
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+1 for high frequency vibration
and!
+1 for LSE (low surface energy) material - as the video provider doesnt show anything other than a similarly colored and lit (=same?) surface and blade.
it is working like this, not about material.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keX1-65rrLE&NR=1
trade secret my ass.
-I might also venture to say that the thin belt on the spatula is likely teflon, or some other low-surface-energy material. Might also be the case that the "spatula" is being vibrated at a high frequency to provide an ultra low-friction surface. ;)
Just from the video observation I believe the unit is a thin sheet stretched over a more traditional scraper. The sheet slides over the scraper as it extends and retracts lifting the material onto the unit in a rolling motion, more like a micro conveyor belt than a scraper.
Give aways include: lack of inertial motion in the gels, thickness of the "scraper", lack of gel pushing by scraper lip.
Great manufacturing tool for jellies, but significantly more complicated than I think the writer assumed.