A good egg: robot chef trained to make omelettes

A team of engineers have trained a robot to prepare an omelette, all the way from cracking the eggs to plating the finished dish, and refined the 'chef's' culinary skills to produce a reliable dish that actually tastes good. 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? Fumiya Iida The researchers, from the University of Cambridge 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 the journal IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters , and will be available online as part of the virtual IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2020). A robot that can cook has been an aspiration of sci-fi authors, futurists, and scientists for decades. As artificial intelligence techniques have advanced, 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. "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 is a challenging task, since it must deal with complex problems in robot manipulation, computer vision, sensing and human-robot interaction, and produce a consistent end product.