Robot Chefs Who Can Learn to Cook by Watching Videos Developed in England

BONSERNEWS.com – Researchers at the University of Cambridge, England, say they are training robots to become good cooks. The robot is instructed to watch and study food preparation videos, then recreate the dish itself.

Currently it is still a simple food, namely salad. The researchers trained the robot to make eight different salad recipes.

Doctoral student Grzegorz Sochacki and his colleagues in the university’s robotics lab created a simple salad recipe, then filmed themselves preparing it.

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Using computer vision, the robot analyzes each frame of the video, and is able to identify different objects and features, such as knives, ingredients, plus the arms, hands and face of a human chef. As a result, the robot can make salads.

What these researchers did shows that artificial intelligence (artificial intelligence) enabling robots to perform tasks previously performed by humans. “If you can train a person with demonstrations, you can do the same with a robot,” he explains.

The researchers say the robot they are developing is unlikely to learn to cook from cooking shows on television. They say the kinds of instructional videos needed are very different from those created by television chefs.

Robot Flippy 2 lifts french fries from an oil vat at the Miso Robotics Inc factory laboratory in Pasadena, California, U.S. September 27, 2022. (Bonsernews.com/voaindonesia.com/Sandra Stojanovic/REUTERS TV via REUTERS)

The chef’s robot currently, for example, has trouble identifying carrots, which are hidden in human hands. What’s more, show cooking usually involves lots of tools, like whisks and spoons, and lots of spices.

However, Sochacki said it is not impossible that the chef robot developed by his team at Cambridge could one day learn to cook something more complicated.

The university’s research results were published in the IEEE Access Journal early June. The researchers say training robots to learn by watching videos will help make food production easier to automate.

“If you already have a robot chef, you can demonstrate your favorite recipe to the robot and it will add the recipe to its cooking collection. You don’t need to reprogram the robot. In fact, you can make slight changes to a recipe that the robot already knows to make it the way you want it.” (ab/uh)/Associated Press/voaindonesia.com. ()