Robots have for some time been expanding the sort of work they do. They started in industry making things, often in partnership with humans. They then moved into services such as healthcare and defence, as well as working in call centres and other knowledge-based professions. Today, they are helping out consumers, vacuum cleaning homes and mowing lawns.
Software designer and electronic engineer Mark Oleynik believes that domestic robots can do much more in the home. Moley Robotics, a company he founded in 2014, is designing a robot kitchen that will be able to cook the favourite dishes of owners.
“Our robot kitchen will be designed to follow the recipe by assembling the ingredients, preparing them, cooking them for the right time and cleaning up afterwards,” says Oleynik. “The number of operations is not very big, especially compared with surgery which robots are learning to do and where a mistake would be dangerous.”
Set to launch on the consumer market in 2018, the Robotic Kitchen will feature two robotic arms equipped with tactile sensors, an oven, a hob and protective glass screens.
Controlled via an app and armed with an online library of recipes (regularly updated by a team of professional chefs), the robot will be able to order the ingredients over the internet and have the meals ready for when its owners return home.
So far, it has mastered soup and can cook almost any variation simply by changing the ingredients and the timing. The most difficult dishes are those that involve the fine manipulation of the ingredients, such as putting them inside another ingredient.
“Recipes are complicated because what people like to eat is a very personal thing. There is no objective data that tells you how food should be cooked,” Oleynik says. “There may be thousands of variations when cooking a steak, for example – the cuts of meat, marinades, methods of cooking and the time taken to cook them. But a steak is just a piece of meat and the options can be incorporated into different recipes.”
Building on existing technological advances, it is possible to imagine a robo-chef of the future who can “smell” and “taste” the food, and uses machine learning techniques to perfect recipes and design new ones.
One thing is for sure – the appetite for robots is firmly on the rise. According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) forecasts, some 42 million service robots for personal and domestic use will be sold in 2016-9, compared to 5.4 million in 2015. As technology develops, people will increasingly look for opportunities to automate the tasks they do not enjoy or are not very good at.
“I am a computer engineer, but I am also a food lover and I like trying different foods. But I can’t cook, so that is why I invented the robotic kitchen,” explains Oleynik.
