Robot ’chef’ learns to recreate recipes from watching food videos

Researchers have trained a robotic -chef- to watch and learn from cooking videos, and recreate the dish itself. We wanted to see whether we could train a robot chef to learn in the same incremental way that humans can - by identifying the ingredients and how they go together in the dish Greg Sochacki The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, programmed their robotic chef with a -cookbook- of eight simple salad recipes. After watching a video of a human demonstrating one of the recipes, the robot was able to identify which recipe was being prepared and make it. In addition, the videos helped the robot incrementally add to its cookbook. At the end of the experiment, the robot came up with a ninth recipe on its own. Their results , reported in the journal IEEE Access , demonstrate how video content can be a valuable and rich source of data for automated food production, and could enable easier and cheaper deployment of robot chefs. Robotic chefs have been featured in science fiction for decades, but in reality, cooking is a challenging problem for a robot.