The tech world is ever-expanding, and robots are gradually becoming the future in many industries. But perfecting the art of cooking was one of the few challenging things for a robot. Researchers from the University of Cambridge have now programmed a robot to watch and learn cooking. The robot can watch human cooking demonstrations and can recreate the dish on its own!
Robot ‘Chef’ is pre-programmed with a “cookbook” that includes eight simple recipes. The videos demonstrating the recipes in the cookbook were then shown to the robot. Surprisingly, the robot was able to see and identify the recipe demonstrated in the video. The Robot chef then recreated the same dish shown in the video.
The researchers used neural networks to train the Robot chef. The robot can identify various objects, ingredients (fruits and vegetables), and even recipes through the network. Advanced computer vision techniques help the robot understand objects and human demonstrations.
“We wanted to see whether we could train a robot chef to learn in the same incremental way that humans can – by identifying the ingredients and how they go together in the dish,” said Grzegorz Sochacki from the University of Cambridge’s Engineering department.
Out of the research tests conducted, the robot chef identified the recipes 93% of the time. The human demonstrations were also correctly understood by it 83% of the time. As the research studies ended, the robot chef came up with a ninth recipe on its own.
Cooking or recreating a dish simply by watching used to be a challenging task for robots. Unlike humans, their ability to observe and prepare the dish on its own seemed far-fetched. But this robot seemed to have changed the game. This development could leave Robot chefs to soon take over the kitchens.
