Pizza Bot

At a food-delivery company based in California, robots work alongside human employees to serve up piping-hot pizzas. Inside the kitchen of Zume Pizza, a robot called Doughbot flattens balls of dough into circles in nine seconds. Another, called Marta, spreads tomato sauce. And a bot named Bruno loads the pizzas into the oven. Together, robots and cooks can churn out 372 pizzas per hour.

Zume aims to fuse cooking and automation—technology that allows machinery to operate without assistance. The idea isn’t limited to pizza making. Robots and people are working together in many industries, says John Bubnikovich of ABB Robotics, which created Marta and Bruno. Robots generally take over simple, tedious tasks, while humans handle the complex ones.