As 2020 grinds into gear, CNET will be kick-starting a new decade with a trip to the Nevada desert for the annual tech bonanza CES. When we arrive in Las Vegas, we expect to be greeted by a bunch of new TVs, scores of eccentric gadgets and a whole gaggle of robots. We're still some years away from robots outnumbering humans at the show, but every year it does seem as though more bots are present on the show floor. In the past decade we've seen robots become more complex, more affordable and more diverse. The number of contexts in which they play a role in our lives -- from the home to the workplace and beyond -- have expanded to provide us with a vision of how humans and robots will coexist and collaborate in the future.

Visitors to this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) at the Las Vegas Convention Center will have the option of chowing down on robot-made pizzas. Live event hospitality supplier Centerplate has selected Seattle-based food technology company Picnic to provide its automated food assembly system that will create up to 300 12-inch bespoke pizzas an hour on the CES show floor. Originally developed for the high-volume production of bespoke pizzas, Picnic's automated food assembly system was trialed at the T-Mobile Park stadium in Seattle in October this year. The system is modular, freestanding, doesn't take up much space and uses deep-learning to adapt to its tasks and settings. According to Picnic, it requires little training to use and in addition to pizzas, it is also designed to prepare other types of food, including bun, bowl, tortilla, and plate formats.

After three years of quietly toiling away on a robotic food system, Seattle startup Picnic has emerged from stealth mode with a system that assembles custom pizzas with little human intervention. Picnic -- previously known as Otto Robotics and Vivid Robotics -- is the latest entrant in a cohort of startups and industry giants trying to find ways to automate restaurant kitchens in the face of slim margins and labor shortages. It's highly variable," said Picnic CEO Clayton Wood. "We learned a lot about food science in the process of developing the system." Picnic invited me down to their headquarters in Seattle's Interbay neighborhood last week for a chance to sling pies with their secretive pizza robot. Walking up to the system, I was taken aback at how unassuming it looked. Picnic's platform had none of the industrial machismo of a Vulcan range. Instead, it looked like a white, kitchen-sized iPhone. Despite the simple exterior, the component parts were mesmerizing -- from the sauce ...