Robotic Wok Cooking: ABB Robots and Stir-Fry Machines

A good stir-fry depends on a few seconds of very high heat, a quick toss and exact timing, and for a long time that looked like the last thing a machine could copy. Robotic wok cooking is now in thousands of Chinese restaurants and is starting to reach home kitchens. This post traces the job from wok chefs in restaurant kitchens to the first automatic stir-fry machines and robot restaurants. It then looks at this year's cooking robots in China, where ABB robots such as the IRB 1200 Hygienic fit, and what still stands between a robot wok and your stove.

A chef cooking over a flaming wok in Beerse, Belgium. Photo: Ricardo Liberato / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

From wok chefs to the first stir-fry machines

The wok has been the main pan of Chinese cooking for centuries, and restaurant stir-frying is hard physical work. A cook stands over a burner much hotter than a home stove, tosses a heavy iron pan with one hand and adds oil, sauce and ingredients with the other, often for a whole shift. Cantonese cooks call the smoky taste that comes from this wok hei, the breath of the wok. A 1951 photo from a Chinese restaurant kitchen in Amsterdam shows a cook at this work alone, surrounded by pots and ladles.

A cook preparing a dish in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant in Amsterdam, 1951. Photo: Emmy Andriesse / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first machines set out to copy the stirring and the heat control. In 2007 Chinese researchers led by W. X. Yan described an automatic cooking robot for Chinese dishes in the journal Robotica. Commercial stir-fry machines followed in China. Many are a motor-driven drum or tilting wok with a stirring paddle, an induction heater and dispensers for oil and sauce. A cook loads the raw food, picks a recipe and lets the machine run.

A street food vendor stir-frying in a wok in Trivandrum, Kerala, India. Photo: Anand Anil / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robot restaurants built on the idea. In May 2018 four MIT graduates opened Spyce in downtown Boston, where seven automated woks cooked bowls in about three minutes with recipes by chef Daniel Boulud. The restaurant closed in October 2021 after Sweetgreen bought the company. In June 2020 Country Garden's Qianxi group opened a robot restaurant complex in Shunde, Guangdong, with more than 20 cooking robots and seats for nearly 600 diners, including machines that cook clay pot rice.

The former Spyce restaurant at 241 Washington Street in Boston, which closed in October 2021. Photo: 4300streetcar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Robot woks in Chinese kitchens today, and where ABB fits

This year robot woks have become ordinary kitchen equipment in China. At the World Robot Conference in Beijing on 23 August, XiangLu Robotics showed a cooking AI model it calls CookingMuse, a vision-guided cooking robot and RobotCook, a container kitchen that stores, cooks, plates and cleans by itself. The company says its cooking robots work in about 13,000 stores in nearly 350 cities. In a demonstration reported by China Daily, a staff member poured 100 ml of water into a wok of mapo tofu, and the robot adjusted heat and time until the sauce thickened. Futurism, writing about the same show, described a robotic wok that reaches 300 degrees Celsius with its own ingredient dispenser.

Street food cooks stir-frying at a night market stall in Pattaya, Thailand, where the work is still done by hand. Photo: PattayaPatrol / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Cooking robots are also moving into homes. In September JD.com launched CHEFRESH, a service that plans meals with AI, sends cleaned and portioned ingredients through its cold-chain network and lets a home cooking robot do the cooking, seasoning and cleaning. Pre-orders opened in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other cities, and Business Insider covered it on 22 September. The robot can also record a family recipe, including heat and timing, and repeat it. We wrote about the meal-planning side in home cooking with AI meal plans.

A Vorwerk Thermomix TM6, which weighs, chops, stirs and heats with guided recipes. Photo: EinAnonymerBenutzerVonVielen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not make a wok robot, but it does build arms for this kind of kitchen. The IRB 1200 Hygienic has an IP67 body, an IP69K stainless tool flange and food-grade NSF H1 oil, and ABB aims it at quick-service restaurants, kiosks and central kitchens. An IRB 4600 already runs inside the Roboeatz ARK autonomous kitchen. In a wok line, an IRB 1200 Hygienic could, as a possibility, dose ingredients, move pans between burners, plate food and handle cleaning, while the wok machine does the stirring. Programs like this are usually tested first in RobotStudio.

An ABB IRB 1200 Hygienic robot picking bananas, a food handling demo. Photo: ABB

What comes next for robot woks at home and in restaurants

In restaurants, the next step is linking the parts. In some Chinese kitchens one apprentice now runs three stir-fry machines at once, so the machine saves the skilled tossing but not the prep. Arms that fetch ingredients from cold storage, load woks and plate dishes would close that gap, and military kitchens are trying the same thing: in February 2026 the US Army showed an autonomous robotic kitchen at Camp Walker in Daegu, Korea. Restaurants with long menus will find it harder than chains with twenty dishes.

A US Army commander is briefed on an autonomous robotic kitchen at Camp Walker in Daegu, Korea, February 2026. Photo: Sgt. Deziree Keay, U.S. Army via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

At home, space and price decide things. A countertop wok robot has to vent smoke, clean its own pan and work with a normal power socket, which limits how hot it can get. That heat limit matters for wok hei, which needs flames or very strong induction. Services like CHEFRESH avoid part of the problem by doing the washing and cutting in a central kitchen, which turns the home robot into the last step of a supply chain. A household that uses the full service gets both the robot and the ingredients from the same company, which is convenient but leaves it with one supplier.

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

Safety comes first on the list of open problems. Hot oil and open flames near children need firm safety limits, and a robot arm in a home kitchen would need the force and speed limits found on cobots like ABB's GoFa. Recipes are another issue. The machines repeat what a chef recorded, so experienced cooks are still needed to create and tune dishes, and in some kitchens master chefs now cook dishes for the machines to record and copy. Cost will decide how fast all of this spreads. For now robotic wok cooking is a restaurant tool that is just starting to appear in homes.

The ARK's gripper holding a freshly cooked bowl of pasta. Photo: ABB

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