Bright Spot: Rocket scientists build mobile pizza robot

Hawthorne, CA (WFSB) - A robot could be making your next pizza. A team of former rocket scientists are turning their talents to make America’s favorite pie.

Getting a spaceship into outer space, getting a fresh, hot pizza delivered in Los Angeles; to former Space-X engineer, Benson Tsai, both are equally challenging and equally important.

Enough to turn the literal rocket scientist into a restauranteur. “Ultimately for me it’s about solving problems wherever they are, solving problems here on earth, affordable access to high quality, fresh foods is not something that is readily available for everyone, right?”

Over the last three years he, two co-founders and 23 other former Space-X scientists have created the ‘Stellar Pizza System,’ a fully automated, fully enclosed mobile pizza maker.

Some of what Tsai used when it came to designing the battery system that sent an actual rocket to space can be found in this portable pizza shop. “Our electronics are designed with the reliability that is required to get humans to space. It is a team of rocket scientists designing kitchen equipment from scratch.”

From assembly… “We freshly cut our pepperonis onto every pizza,” to cooking, cameras are on every step ready to make adjustments. What’s even more impressive, is the fact that the pizza system can crank out a pie in less than five minutes and it’ll do it all inside a truck on the way to your house. An algorithm will consider traffic and other obstacles to help decided when to start cooking your order.

No human labor and no real estate means less cost. Most pizzas will be around $10.

“What we’re trying to do is very hard, I needed to recruit the best and the brightest to develop a mobile pizza machine that is basically a spaceship on wheels.”

Tsai said they used a scientific method in recipe development, trying and failing and then hiring an actual chef and other food experts to make a pizza they think it out of this world.

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