This robot chef is learning to taste and cook food like a human

Come over, Gordon Ramsay. There’s a new MasterChef in town.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge and appliance manufacturer Beko have teamed up to create a robotic chef that can cook a perfect omelette. In doing so, it also learns to prepare dishes with the right taste and texture. In a new study published Wednesday in the journal Borders in Robotics and AIThe researchers trained their “Iron Chef” to taste a dish while cooking, a skill they believe will help automate food preparation and allow you to one day have a head. own home cooking kitchen.

The team made the cut for them. After all, flavors are complex — and Mankind Taste is not just about taste. Our brains rely on information about the look, smell, texture, and temperature of food to determine if we like the food or not. This happens while we are chewing and cooking, like when you are sampling a dish during preparation to make sure you have the right amount of seasoning.

“As we taste, chewing also provides continuous feedback to our brains,” said Arsen Abdulali, a robotics engineer at Cambridge University and co-author of the study, in a statement. press report. “Current electronic testing methods only take a single snapshot from an already homogenized sample, so we wanted to simulate chewing and tasting more realistically in a robotic system to creating a better end product.”

In previous experiments, the robot created by the University of Cambridge and the Beko team learned how to make skippable omelettes. To up the cooking game, the researchers didn’t send it to Le Cordon Bleu — they gave it a probe attached to a robotic arm to test for salinity. This probe allows the robot to “taste” different scrambled eggs and tomatoes when the tomato quantity and salinity are different.

The robot then “tasted” nine variations of the same dish but with an egg mixture that was mixed to mimic the different textures of the chewing process. Based on all this information, it then creates a flavor map for each dish. These results have improved the robot chef’s ability to quickly and accurately assess the taste of food.

“When a robot learns to cook, like any other chef, it needs indications of how well it did,” says Abdulali. “We want the robots to understand the concept of taste, which will help them cook better. In our testing, the robot was able to ‘see’ the difference in food as it was chewed, which improved its ability to taste. “

Cambridge University researchers hope such a robot will be in households and possibly even assist living homes in the future. So don’t expect chefs to order this one recipe out anytime soon. But for now, they’re working on expanding its palate — a little less salt and eggs, a little more sweetness and oil. That means you will be able to enjoy The Great Robotic Bake Off on Netflix soon.