These Robots Are Making Meals for a Nonprofit in San Francisco’s Tenderloin

这些机器人正在为旧金山田德隆区的非营利组织制作餐食

These potato-salad-slinging AI chefs aren’t taking anyone’s jobs. Not yet, anyway. They’re just here as volunteers. 这些负责分装土豆沙拉的 AI 厨师并没有抢走任何人的饭碗。至少目前还没有。它们只是作为志愿者在这里工作。

Project Open Hand, a nonprofit founded in 1985 by local grandmother and HIV-awareness advocate Ruth Brinker, prepares and packages meals to meet the diverse nutritional requirements of people who need them. The effort began in response to the AIDS crisis, but the nonprofit has since expanded the meals it makes for people with conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, or chronic kidney disease. “Project Open Hand”是一家成立于 1985 年的非营利组织，由当地祖母级人物、艾滋病防治倡导者露丝·布林克（Ruth Brinker）创立，旨在准备和包装餐食，以满足有需要人群的多样化营养需求。这项工作最初是为了应对艾滋病危机，但该组织此后扩大了服务范围，为患有心脏病、糖尿病或慢性肾病等疾病的人群提供餐食。

But it takes many people to make these meals, and Project Open Hand has struggled to entice volunteers to help fill the meal kits. The organization is housed in a four-story building in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. During peak hours, the place feels like a big operation, usually bustling with people. Some of them are there in need of the free meals, some are staff and volunteers there to make the food and keep the place running. 制作这些餐食需要大量人手，而 Project Open Hand 一直难以招募到足够的志愿者来协助装配餐盒。该组织位于旧金山田德隆区（Tenderloin）的一栋四层建筑内。在高峰时段，这里看起来像是一个大型作业现场，通常人头攒动。其中一些人是来领取免费餐食的，另一些则是负责制作食物和维持机构运转的工作人员及志愿者。

The process of putting together medically tailored meal boxes can get complicated. Different patients have different needs, so the meals that go out for donation cannot be one-size-fits-all and have to account for allergies and nutrient requirements based on people’s needs and medical conditions. That’s where the robots come in. 组装“医疗定制餐盒”的过程非常复杂。不同的患者有不同的需求，因此捐赠的餐食不能千篇一律，必须根据个人的需求和医疗状况考虑过敏原和营养要求。这就是机器人派上用场的地方。

“It’s not even that they’re faster,” says Alma Caceres, a sous chef who works on the meal prep process at Project Open Hand. “It’s that we don’t have the volunteers.” “这甚至不是因为它们更快，”在 Project Open Hand 负责餐食准备工作的副主厨阿尔玛·卡塞雷斯（Alma Caceres）说，“而是因为我们实在招不到志愿者。”

Chef Robotics is a San Francisco company that makes “physical AI for the food industry.” It’s one of the many companies focused on building robots that can better handle physical objects. Chef’s automated robots focus specifically on plating—no cooking or chopping—just the act of getting the food on a plate at scale. It has clients for its robo-made meals, such as Amy’s Kitchen and Factor, the frozen-meal company. Chef Robotics is also training its robots to eventually handle more complex tasks, like assembling a hamburger piece by piece. Chef Robotics 是一家位于旧金山的初创公司，致力于为食品行业打造“物理 AI”。它是众多专注于制造能更好处理实物机器人的公司之一。Chef 的自动化机器人专门负责装盘——不涉及烹饪或切菜——只是大规模地将食物装入餐盘。它的客户包括 Amy’s Kitchen 和冷冻餐食公司 Factor。Chef Robotics 还在训练其机器人，以便最终处理更复杂的任务，例如逐层组装汉堡。

The partnership with Open Hand came from a chance conversation between employees from the two organizations on the Bay Area Rapid Transit. When presented with the idea, Project Open Hand’s CEO, Paul Hepfer, said the cost of renting the robots felt worth it. (Yes, they pay a subscription fee.) 与 Open Hand 的合作源于两家机构的员工在湾区捷运（BART）上的一次偶然交谈。当这个想法被提出时，Project Open Hand 的首席执行官保罗·赫普弗（Paul Hepfer）表示，租用机器人的成本是值得的。（是的，他们需要支付订阅费。）

“Nonprofits often operate under a scarcity mindset, and I think that’s a disservice to the people we serve, because then you’re not looking for innovations or quality improvements,” Hepfer tells WIRED. “There’s not a whole lot of robots, AI, and innovation in the Tenderloin, I would bet.” “非营利组织往往在匮乏心态下运作，我认为这对我们服务的人群是一种伤害，因为这样你就不会去寻求创新或质量提升，”赫普弗告诉《连线》（WIRED）杂志，“我敢打赌，在田德隆区，机器人、人工智能和创新并不多见。”

San Francisco’s Tenderloin district has long been its most fraught, due to higher levels of crime, people experiencing homelessness, and drug use. If you’ve ever seen stories pushing the narrative that San Francisco is a dirty, unsafe city caught in a “doom loop,” they were probably talking about the Tenderloin. 由于犯罪率较高、无家可归者较多以及药物滥用问题，旧金山的田德隆区长期以来一直是该市最令人担忧的地区。如果你曾看到过关于旧金山是一座陷入“厄运循环”、肮脏且不安全城市的报道，它们很可能指的就是田德隆区。

The Covid-19 pandemic didn’t help either, as people fled the city in droves. Open Hand, which had become particularly dependent on corporate volunteers who came to help assemble meals as part of company-sanctioned charity efforts, found its source of labor had vanished. 新冠疫情也让情况雪上加霜，人们纷纷逃离这座城市。Open Hand 此前非常依赖企业志愿者（他们作为公司认可的慈善活动的一部分来协助装配餐食），结果发现劳动力来源消失了。

San Francisco has made a sort of comeback in the past couple of years, buoyed by the AI boom. But that influx of money and workers has not exactly translated to the kind of corporate chivalry Open Hand had long relied on. 在过去几年里，得益于人工智能热潮，旧金山实现了一定程度的复苏。但资金和人才的涌入并没有完全转化为 Open Hand 长期依赖的那种企业公益精神。

“We used to have so many corporate groups come in here,” Hepfer says. “There are so many new businesses—AI businesses, biopharma businesses—that aren’t engaged the way they were pre-pandemic, which is really unfortunate. I think we need to kind of figure that out, collectively.” “我们过去常有许多企业团队来这里，”赫普弗说，“现在有这么多新企业——人工智能企业、生物制药企业——但它们不像疫情前那样参与公益活动了，这真的很遗憾。我认为我们需要共同找出解决办法。”

Hepfer says Open Hand’s volunteers had been able to fill around 500 meals every hour. The robots, when things go smoothly, can help put together another 200 on top of that. Human volunteers can then be deployed to other, less monotonous tasks like chopping vegetables or cooking batches of plant-based protein in the kitchen down the hall. 赫普弗表示，Open Hand 的志愿者每小时能装配约 500 份餐食。在运行顺利的情况下，机器人可以额外再完成 200 份。这样，人类志愿者就可以被分配到其他不那么单调的任务中，比如在走廊尽头的厨房里切菜或烹饪大批量的植物蛋白。

If you went to Open Hand, you might not even notice the robots. There are two of them, and they’re only active a couple of hours per day as part of an assembly line along a conveyor belt with a handful of volunteers. Everyone else is in the kitchen, cooking and chopping vegetables, or out in shipping, putting meals in delivery vehicles. 如果你去 Open Hand，你甚至可能注意不到这些机器人。现场只有两台，它们每天只工作几个小时，作为传送带流水线的一部分，与少数志愿者协同工作。其他人则在厨房里烹饪和切菜，或者在发货区将餐食装入配送车辆。

“Having an arm and a scooping motion turns a physics problem—like how cooked is your onion, to a software problem—like do you have the right motion path?” says Rajat Bhageria, CEO of Chef Robotics. “So it’s a lot more scalable.” “拥有机械臂和舀取动作，将一个物理问题——比如洋葱煮得有多熟——转化为了一个软件问题——比如你是否有正确的运动路径？”Chef Robotics 的首席执行官拉贾特·巴格里亚（Rajat Bhageria）说，“所以它的可扩展性要强得多。”

The robot arms can be swapped out with fittings to handle around 70 different ingredients. They can also be a little sloppy. The arms reach down like claw machines into trays of various scoopable foods, dropping big plops of potato salad into a specific section of each tray. They get their aim right most of the time, but still occasionally make a mess as they drop the food. One human volunteer has the job of wiping the bits of food off the trays before the meals are sealed and whisked away. On the ground is a scattering of frozen corn that will get swept up and discarded after the job is done. 机械臂可以更换配件，以处理大约 70 种不同的食材。它们有时也会显得有些笨拙。机械臂像抓娃娃机一样伸入装有各种可舀取食物的托盘中，将一大坨土豆沙拉放入托盘的特定区域。它们大多数时候瞄得很准，但偶尔在投放食物时也会弄得一团糟。一名人类志愿者的工作就是在餐食被密封并运走之前，擦掉托盘上的食物残渣。地上散落着一些冷冻玉米粒，工作结束后会被清扫并丢弃。

Maybe it’s not elegant, but as one of the volunteers points out, the robots aren’t any messier than the humans. 也许这并不优雅，但正如一位志愿者指出的那样，机器人并不比人类更邋遢。

“Food is weird,” Bhageria says. “It’s sticky, it’s malleable, it’s wet. Even the best simulation doesn’t completely get it.” “食物是很奇怪的东西，”巴格里亚说，“它粘稠、可塑、潮湿。即使是最好的模拟也无法完全掌握它的特性。”

Having the robots doesn’t offset the need for volunteers, Hepfer says. He’s hopeful that by investing in this tech-forward experiment, Open Hand can make the case that it’s worth attention from the city’s monied interests. Maybe it could even encourage more people to volunteer. 赫普弗表示，拥有机器人并不能抵消对志愿者的需求。他希望通过投资这项前沿技术实验，Open Hand 能够证明自己值得城市中资本方的关注。也许这甚至能鼓励更多人参与志愿服务。

“A lot of times people in the for-profit world think, ‘Oh, that’s a cute little nonprofit,’” Hepfer says. “I’m hoping that maybe the gravy on top of all this—the low-salt gravy on top—might be that people from the te…” “很多时候，营利性行业的人会想，‘哦，那只是个可爱的小型非营利组织，’”赫普弗说，“我希望这一切的‘肉汁’——那种低盐的肉汁——可能是让来自科技界的人们……”