The robot was programmed with a ‘cookbook’ of eight simple salad recipes, and after watching a video of a human demonstrating one of them it could identify which was being prepared and make it.
The videos also helped the robot incrementally add to its cookbook. At the end of the experiment, it was able to come up with a ninth recipe on its own. The researchers said their results demonstrate how video content can be a valuable source of data for automated food production, and could enable easier and cheaper deployment of robot chefs.
Several commercial companies have built prototype robot chefs, although none of these are currently commercially available, and they lag well behind their human counterparts in terms of skill.
Human cooks can learn new recipes through observation, whether that’s watching another person cook or watching a video on YouTube, but programming a robot to make a range of dishes is costly and time-consuming.
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