Taste plays a major role in the entire cooking process. To understand whether a dish has the right amount of salt, sugar and spices, it is very important to taste it. Also, to understand the texture of food, it is equally important to chew it properly. For example, until you have had a piece of mango, you will not understand whether it is juicy, sweet and ripe. It’s something that experts struggled with when developing robots to automate the cooking process in a professional kitchen (personal kitchens, as well). While a robot chef at a restaurant was minimizing the manual labor, the struggle remained with the taste. That’s why researchers at the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with a home appliance maker, have created a culinary robot. Wonder what it is? A culinary robot is something that not only automates the cooking process but also tastes food to understand its taste. They “trained their robot chef to assess the saltiness of a dish at different stages of the chewing process, mimicking a similar process in humans,” a report on the official Cambridge University website reads. The study’s findings were published in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI.
During the process, the robotic chef “who has already been trained to make omelets based on human tastes”, was made to taste nine different types of dishes made from scrambled eggs and tomatoes. These robots also went through three different stages of the chewing process, based on which they created a ‘taste map’ of the dishes.
It was found that this process of taste mapping improved the robot’s ability to sense the spice and saltiness of a dish to be more accurate. “Most home chefs will be familiar with the concept of tasting as you go – checking a dish during the cooking process to check if the balance of flavors is just right. If a robot is used for certain aspects of food preparation If this is to be done, it is important that they are able to taste what they are cooking,” explains Grzegorz Souchacki of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, first author of the paper.
The report further notes that researchers are working on improving future robot chefs, which can taste a variety of foods to improve sensing capabilities.
About Somdutt SahuInvestigator- Somdutt likes to call this himself. In the matter of food, people or places, she only wants to know the unknown. A simple aglio oleo pasta or dal-rice and a good movie can make his day.