Coimbatore: A group of five youngsters who are passionate about theme-based restaurants , have opened a robot-themed restaurant on Avinashi Road in the city.Robots are used in the restaurant to pick up food from the kitchen and deliver it at the customer’s table. The robots will also be able to detect someone blocking their way and request them to move out of their way.“When one of our partners, Venkatesh, travelled abroad, he saw robots serving him at restaurants in China and Africa,” said Karthikeyan, one of the five partners owning the restaurant.The youngsters, who were already running an aeroplane-themed Chinese restaurant, began working on sourcing robots and figuring out how to program and repair them.“We finally sourced them from a company abroad. Venkatesh then went to the company and spent some time learning to program, operate and repair them,” said Karthikeyan.“We started our first restaurant on Old Mahabalipuram Road in Chennai around eight months ago and named it ‘Robot-themed Restaurant’. It was a successful venture,” he said.“In their feedback, many of our customers who visited our OMR restaurant said we should come to Coimbatore, so we began working on it,” Karthikeyan said.The restaurant in the city, which serves Chinese, Thai and Indian food, has eight robots. Customers can place their order on an iPad placed at every table. The food prepared by chefs is then transferred to the tray held by robots and they are programmed to serve it at the specific table. However, waiters are employed to serve the food from the robot’s tray to customer’s plate.“We decided to employ waiters, so they can explain the names of the dishes to the customers because we have many varieties of breads, fried rice, gravies etc,” said Karthikeyan.“Currently, we have not been able to reduce staff strength because we have two people to operate the robots,” he said. The robots cost around Rs 7 lakh each.

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