Who needs humans? At a ramen noodle shop in Nagoya, Japan, a pair of robotic arms serve up 80 bowls of noodles a day to their hungry customers. They never get tired and they don't need tips.

While a noodle-cooking robot has been around for a while, apparently noodle-creating has just entered the robotic age. The Sanuki Shokunin robot can make traditional buckwheat soba noodles and other Japanese noodles of varying thickness and ingredients, but this robot is eyeing global dominance. A slight change to the settings and it can also crank out Chinese noodles too.

The robot is meant to save time with the ability to churn out 700 servings an hour, and it also saves money, since any employee in a restaurant can make it instead of relying on a noodle sensei. It's being billed as an attraction to entice customers to see their noodles being made by robot hands. Since when did "hand-made" become a bad thing?

The machine uses a special pasta dough kneader mechanism, along with a razor-sharp adjustable cutting blade to slice up precision pieces of pasta. The Sanuki Shokunin can crank out up to 700 portions of noodles an hour. Just load in some dough, push a couple of buttons to adjust the pasta size (in 0.1 mm increments) on the control screen, and watch the noodles fly. When finished, you can turn to the pevious mentioned noodle cooking robot, who handles the rest. Now lie back and wait for your noodles to be finished! (DVice)