Cambridge scientists claim that cooking robots are capable of ‘tasting and evaluating the balance of flavors.
Machines are learning fast and replacing human beings at a greater speed than they have ever. A new development in this direction is a cooking robot that has the ability to taste food. Not only can it taste food, but it is also able to taste even while preparing the food! This further results in the robot being able to sense the taste of food at different phases of chewing while a person is eating the food. The cooking robots market is estimated to witness a growth of 15% over the period of 2019-28.
A robot chef developed by researchers from Cambridge University has been trained to detect saltiness and the variety of ingredients in different phases of chewing. It’s the same way as humans.
It’s a step up from the current testing using electronic devices that offers a brief glimpse of the salinity of food. The process of replicating human taste research suggests that it will produce a better-tasting final product.
To understand human taste, researchers taught the robot chef in making Omelets. It then tasted nine varieties of scrambled eggs and tomatoes in three different stages of eating. A sensor for salinity attached to the arm of the robot read out indications while the robot was making dishes. To mimic the process of chewing the team mixed eggs and then allowed the robot to test the dish once more.
Researchers from Cambridge University say this could in the near future, resulting in automated robots’ food preparation that can determine what is most appealing to people. The quest to understand the science behind cooking has already resulted in the robot chef being able to prepare an omelet on the basis of the feedback of a taster.
“Most home cooks are aware of the notion of tasting while cooking and examining an item throughout cook time to see whether the equilibrium in flavors is correct. If robots are going to be used in specific aspects of food preparation, it’s vital that they’re able to taste what they’re making,” said Grzegorz Sochacki from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, the paper’s primary author.
Dr. Arsen Abdulali, co-author of the study. Arsen Abdulali explained: “When we taste, chewing offers an ongoing feedback loop for our brains. Electronic testing methods currently just take a single image from a homogenized specimen, therefore we sought to recreate an authentic eating and tasting process with a robot system that could yield a more delicious final product.”
There are three distinct phases in which the robot ate nine varieties of the dish and created unique “taste maps” of the dishes as it went along. The data was gathered from a probe for conductance which is similar to the salinity sensor that is mounted on the arm of the robot.
The robot ate food in a grid-like manner every reading took less than two seconds to complete.
To replicate the change in texture while chewing, scientists mixed egg and egg mix and then let the robot taste it. A taste map of every dish was created based on various readings at different times of chewing.
