Robot chef prepares and cooks acceptable omelettes

The researchers from Cambridge University, in collaboration with domestic appliance company Beko, used machine learning to train the robot to account for highly subjective matters of taste. The results are reported in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

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Prototype robot chefs have been built but none have been made commercially available and they lag behind their human counterparts in terms of skill.

"Cooking is a really interesting problem for roboticists, as humans can never be totally objective when it comes to food, so how do we as scientists assess whether the robot has done a good job?" said Dr Fumiya Iida from Cambridge's Department of Engineering, who led the research.

Teaching a robot to prepare and cook food presents complex problems in robot manipulation, computer vision, sensing, human-robot interaction, and the production of a consistent end-product.