They believe the results could be useful in the development of automated or semi-automated food preparation by helping robots to learn what tastes good and what doesn’t.
The robot chef, which has already been trained to make omelettes based on human tasters’ 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.
The researchers found that this ‘taste as you go’ approach significantly improved the robot’s ability to quickly and accurately assess the saltiness of the dish over other electronic tasting technologies, which only test a single homogenised sample.
“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,” said Grzegorz Sochacki, the paper’s first author. “If robots are to be used for certain aspects...