Towards Food Handling Robots for Automated Meal Preparation in Healthcare Facilities

Meal preparation in healthcare facilities is an area of work severely affected by the shortage of qualified personnel. Recent advances in automation technology have enabled the use of picking robots to fill the gaps created by changes in the labor market. Building on these advances, we present a robotic system designed to handle packaged food for automated meal preparation in healthcare facilities. To address the challenge of grasping the large variety of packaged foods, we propose a novel technique for model-free grasping pose detection based on geometric features that is optimized for the given scenario. We provide a comprehensive system overview and conduct evaluations of the grasping success on a real robot. The high grasping success rate of 94 % with a processing time of ∼280 ms indicates the suitability of the proposed approach for automating meal preparation tasks in healthcare facilities.