A team of engineers from the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) has trained a robot to prepare an omelette. Will robots be good at cooking?
"Cooking is a really interesting problem for robotics," says Fumiya Iida, from the Cambridge Department of Engineering and the project. "Since humans can never be totally objective when it comes to food, then how do we as scientists assess whether the robot has done a good job? " He asks.
The researchers used machine learning to try to teach the robot how to complete the entire process that goes into making an omelette, but also how to explain complex questions of taste. While robots have been used in production to create foods such as cookies and pizzas, they are not used in the cooking process, which is subject to many variables and is therefore much more difficult for artificial intelligence to master.
To learn about taste, they used a statistical tool called Bayesian Inference that incorporates feedback from tortilla tasting data samples and uses it to adjust the algorithm and with it, the way the food is cooked.
How do the tortillas come out?
"The tortillas, in general, tasted very good, much better than expected!" Exclaimed Iida.
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