Gourmet robot gives chefs something to chew over

THE demise of the chef is closer than ever, after Cambridge University programmed a robot to judge whether a dish was sufficiently seasoned.

Robots already have the ability to determine the saltiness of static food, but humans taste while chewing, which alters the flavour.

The university has devised a robot chef to taste a sample dish of scrambled eggs and tomatoes at different stages of the chewing process and rate the seasoning. The results could help the development of automated food preparation by helping robots to learn what tastes good, making them better cooks.

“When we taste, the process of chewing also provides continuous feedback to our brains,” said Dr Arsen Abdulali, co-author of the paper published in the journal Frontiers in Robotics & AI.

“Current methods of electronic testing only take a single snapshot from a homogenised sample, so we wanted to replicate a more realistic process of chewing and tasting in a robotic system, which should result in a tastier end product. We want the robots to understand the concept of taste, which will make them better cooks. In our experiment, the robot can ‘see’ the difference in the food as it’s chewed, which improves its ability to taste.”

To imitate human chewing and tasting in their robot chef, the researchers attached a conductance probe, which acts as a salinity sensor, to a robot arm. They prepared scrambled eggs and tomatoes, varying the number of tomatoes and the amount of salt in each dish.

Using the probe, the robot “tasted” the dishes in a grid-like fashion, returning a reading in just a few seconds.

To imitate the change in texture caused by chewing, the team put the egg mixture in a blender and had the robot test the dish again. The readings at different points of “chewing” produced taste maps of each dish.

Their results showed an improvement in the ability of robots to assess saltiness over other electronic tasting methods. “If robots are to be used for food preparation, it’s important they are able to ‘taste’ what they’re cooking,” said Cambridge’s Grzegorz Sochacki.