The rise of AI: A Robot Chef that tastes and cooks like a human

If you thought it was only in the Sci-fi movies that Robots could imitate humans in every way possible, things are about to get REAL. In new research conducted by the University of Cambridge, which has been published in the journal Frontiers in Robotics & AI, it was revealed that the Robot Chefs are for REAL and they can cook and taste like a human. In fact, the culinary world across the world is gearing up for some innovative technologies, but no one must have thought about something like this. Here’s what the report says. (Images courtesy: iStock)

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Let’s accept it, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the need of the hour. It might be said that AI could take on the human race in the coming future, but when it is something like an AI Robot Chef, no one would want to take a back seat. This might remind people of the Megastar Rajnikanth starrer ‘Chitti’, in which he plays the role of a scientist who brings this AI-powered robot ‘Chitti’ to life, who cleans, fights and even cooks food. It was the Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory, that made this AI-enabled Robot Chef that could cook and even taste food.

The researchers worked in collaboration with a domestic appliances manufacturer Beko to achieve this goal. It was trained to taste the food at different stages of the chewing process to assess whether it's sufficiently seasoned. The robot chef, which has already been trained to make omelettes based on a human taster's feedback, tasted nine different variations of a simple dish of scrambled eggs and tomatoes at three different stages of the chewing process and produced 'taste maps' of the different dishes.

As per the author of this research, Grzegorz Sochacki, who is from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering “Most home cooks will be familiar with the concept of tasting as you go checking a dish throughout the cooking process to check whether the balance of flavours is right. If robots are to be used for certain aspects of food preparation, it’s important that they are able to ‘taste’ what they’re cooking.”