LONDON: The world’s first automated kitchen robot was unveiled a week ago at a warehouse in north London during the Hanover Messe industrial robotics show. The first kitchen robot was developed by Moley Robotics in the UK.
According to its makers, the world’s first robotic kitchen can only prepare crab bisque at the moment and it can only do so if all the required ingredients are present. The utensils should be prepositioned perfectly as well.
According to Moley, they aim to have a consumer-ready version robot kitchen within the next two years. They estimate its possible price to be at $14,600 or 10,000 pounds. The company said they are looking forward into developing an iTune like style of library of recipes, where users can download a recipe and the kitchen robot will do it.
At the show, they presented a robot that was made up of two robotic hands, facing a kitchen with the utensils, ingredients, a sink, oven and stovetop. Once set, the controller will press “start” and the robot will do its job. In 30 minutes, a crab bisque is ready to be served.
So how the robot kitchen did prepared the crab bisque?
The robot kitchen was actually doing the same steps that Tim Anderson, the 2011 winner of the television show MasterChef did when he was cooking a crab bisque. The steps that Anderson took was recorded and added into a database that is used to run the kitchen robot. To make it work, the database is executed through a PC running Robotic Operating System (ROS), a robotics platform that usually sits on top of Linux (in this case, Ubuntu).
So basically, the kitchen robot is carrying out a task from memory, a photocopy of Anderson. Hence, when something becomes out of position, the kitchen robot will stop its crab bisque preparation.
The taste? The crab bisque prepared by the kitchen robot was absolutely delicious, taste like a real Anderson cooking.
