Egg Cooking Robot: From Frying Pans to ABB Kitchens

How the egg cooking robot grew from skillets and egg boilers to EGOR and robot arms, and where ABB YuMi, GoFa and IRB 4600 robots fit in breakfast kitchens.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/19/20265 min read

An egg cooking robot sounds like a gadget, but breakfast has been a target for automation for well over a century. In August 2026 the startup Cheffy ran a Kickstarter for EGOR, a countertop machine that cracks eggs into a pan and cooks them to the doneness you pick. This post follows the egg from the cast iron pan to the timed egg boiler to the robot arm in a commercial kitchen. It also looks at where ABB robots such as the YuMi and the IRB 4600 fit, and what stands between a robot and your breakfast at home.

A fried egg with a bright yolk cooking in a dark frying pan

A fried egg cooking in a pan. Photo: Horacio Cambeiro / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

From skillets and egg boilers to the Egg McMuffin

For most of history, eggs were cooked in whatever pan the household owned. Wikipedia notes that copper frying pans existed in ancient Mesopotamia, and that cooks used three legged cast iron spiders in hot coals until kitchen stoves arrived in the mid nineteenth century. Flat bottomed cast iron skillets spread in the late 1800s as stoves became common. Later changes were about convenience. Sunbeam's Automatic Frypan helped popularize electric skillets in 1953, and Marc Gregoire patented a process for bonding Teflon to aluminum in France in 1954 and founded Tefal in 1956.

Empty black cast iron skillet with a long handle on a white surface

A Griswold cast iron skillet, the kind of pan that fried eggs on kitchen stoves. Photo: NMorales (WMF) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Boiled eggs were the first to be automated, because a machine only has to keep time. Wikipedia shows an automatic egg boiler from 1892 that ran on a spirit flame, a 1930 German article on a new electric egg boiler, and an egg cooking pot with a built in timer from 1932. Modern electric cookers use the same idea: a heating plate holds a little water, a lid traps the steam, and a temperature switch or timer ends the cycle once the water has boiled away. The user still cracks, serves and cleans up.

Polished metal egg cooker with two handles and a small clock on its front

A 1932 Junghans egg cooker with a built in clock, made in Schramberg. Photo: Alf van Beem / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Fried eggs moved into restaurants next. The Egg McMuffin, which Wikipedia credits to Herb Peterson in 1972, uses a griddle fried egg whose round shape comes from a ring mold. That detail matters for automation, because a ring and a griddle give a repeatable result that a machine can handle. The labour stayed human for a long time: a person cracked the egg, set the ring and flipped the egg for every order. Repeated, fixed steps like these are the ones robots take over first.

A breakfast sandwich with a round egg, ham and cheese in an English muffin

An Egg McMuffin, built around a griddle fried egg cooked in a ring mold. Photo: Evan-Amos / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

EGOR, omelette robots and ABB in the kitchen

EGOR is the clearest recent example. My Modern Met reported on 17 August 2026 that Cheffy's campaign was fully funded in under seven minutes and had over 3,000 backers. You load eggs into a tube, and the machine cracks them into the pan below. It offers seven doneness modes from sunny side up to hard boiled, fries up to two eggs or boils up to six at once, and its first units ship in December 2026. Scrambled eggs are not supported yet. It is a single purpose appliance and I have only the campaign's claims, not independent tests.

White Bosch electric egg boiler with a clear dome lid on a wooden counter

A Bosch electric egg boiler on a kitchen counter. Photo: Espen Klem / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Commercial kitchens use arms. In 2019 Kurve Automation of Singapore showed AUSCA, a prototype robotic chef that mixes, scrambles, flips and serves omelettes with toppings chosen by the customer, and can also make sunny side up and over easy eggs. A market report published on 12 October 2026 expects home robot kitchens to grow about 30 percent a year to 2036, though a forecast is not a sale. For the commercial side, see our posts on fast food kitchen automation and the robotic wok.

White ABB robot arm inside a glass enclosed kitchen with Roboeatz signs

An ABB IRB 4600 robot inside the Roboeatz ARK autonomous kitchen. Photo: ABB

ABB robots already work in food service. The Roboeatz ARK autonomous kitchen uses an ABB IRB 4600 inside a glass enclosure, and BurgerBots in Los Gatos, California, uses an ABB YuMi cobot to finish burgers. I found no source showing ABB cooking eggs, so an ABB egg station is a possibility and not a project. The pieces exist: an arm to move a pan or load a ring, a cobot such as the GoFa CRB 15000 to work next to staff, and an OmniCore controller to run the cell. Our post on egg handling covers the factory side of the same food.

A stainless steel pancake machine on a counter with a round pancake on a white plate in front

A self service automatic pancake machine at a breakfast buffet, with a finished pancake on the plate. Photo: Martin Dougiamas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Will a robot make your breakfast?

At home, the first products are likely to be single purpose, like EGOR and the egg boiler before it. A full robot arm in a home kitchen is a harder problem. It has to reach across a stove, grip a hot pan, handle a fragile shell and stop at once if a person steps in. Cobots are built to sense contact, and ABB's GoFa and YuMi are designed to work near people. Even so, an arm cooking beside a hob, with oil and steam around it, faces tougher conditions than the same arm in a closed commercial cell.

Dual arm ABB YuMi robot assembling a burger behind glass in a restaurant

An ABB YuMi cobot finishing a burger at BurgerBots in Los Gatos, California. Photo: ABB

Cost and cleaning come next. EGOR is a small appliance with dishwasher safe parts, which suits a home, while a robot arm with grippers, cameras and guarding costs far more than any breakfast needs. Any cooking machine also has to be washed between uses, and an arm has more surfaces to clean than a countertop pot. A commercial breakfast station has a better case, since the same few steps repeat for every order. Programs for such cells can be built and tested first in simulation.

ABB GoFa collaborative robot arm on a wooden table in a bright room

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

I expect two paths. Countertop devices will keep getting better at the narrow job of cracking and timing an egg. Commercial kitchens will add arms for the repeated steps of breakfast service, with staff handling exceptions and customers. A home robot that picks eggs, chooses a pan and plates the result needs cheaper safe arms and better grasping of soft, wet objects, and I found no one selling that today. Until then the skillet is still the more flexible tool, and the robot's strength is making the same fried egg the same way every time.

Two hands cracking a brown egg over a surface in a kitchen

Hands crack an egg in a home kitchen. Photo: Shixart1985 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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