May 9, 2024

This new robot chef can recreate recipes just from watching food videos

The robot watches and learns from cooking videos. Image credit: University of Cambridge.

Nevertheless, a freshly created robot chef could be a game-changer for robotic cooking.

The videos also assisted the robot to broaden its cookbook. At the end of the experiment, the robotic had come up with a ninth salad recipe by itself. The results, the scientists argue, show how video material can be a valuable source of data for automatic food production, and might speed up the release of robotic chefs.

A group of scientists at Cambridge University have trained a robotic to find out and watch from cooking videos and after that recreate the dish. They trained their robotic with a cookbook of 8 simple salad dishes. After watching a video of a human cooking among the salad dishes, the robot might determine which recipe was being prepared and then make it itself.

Robotic chefs have made headings often times in current years. Hype aside, cooking is a highly tough task for a robotic. Many companies have actually built model robotic chefs however none are commercially offered and they drag people in terms of skill.

” We wished to see whether we could train a robotic chef to learn in the exact same incremental manner in which people can– by identifying the ingredients and how they go together in the dish,” Grzegorz Sochacki, a scientist at Cambridge Universitys Department of Engineering and the papers very first author, stated in a media declaration.

Time to cook

The videos used to train the robot arent like the videos made by social media influencers, with visual impacts and quick cuts. The robotic would have a hard time to identify a carrot if the human demonstrator had their hand twisted around it, the scientists discussed. Instead, to determine a carrot, the human demonstrator had to hold it so the robot could completely see it.

As robot chefs get much better and quicker at identifying active ingredients in food videos, the scientists stated they may one day be able to utilize websites such as YouTube to find out an entire variety of dishes. In the meantime, it appears like well need to continue cooking our own food without the help of a robotic cook in our kitchen.

By evaluating the components and observing the actions of the human chef, the robot deduced the recipes being prepared. Out of the 16 videos it observed, the robot recognized the correct recipe in 93% of the cases, despite the fact that it spotted only 83% of the chefs actions. Moreover, the robotic displayed the ability to discern small variations within a recipe, recognizing them as variations rather than distinct recipes.

The robotic analyzed each frame of the video and determined the various objects and functions, such as a knife and the ingredients, as well as the human demonstrators arms, hands, and face.

The study was released in the journal IEEE.

” Its fantastic just how much subtlety the robot was able to find,” said Sochacki. “These recipes arent intricate– theyre essentially sliced veggies and fruits, but it was really effective at recognising, for instance, that 2 chopped apples and 2 sliced carrots is the exact same recipe as 3 chopped apples and three chopped carrots.”

This is a quite huge offer. Like other presentations before it, this robochef has lots of constraints.

For their study, Sochacki and his group devised eight salad dishes and recorded the procedure of preparing them on film. They then used a readily accessible neural network to train their robotic chef. This network had previously been configured to acknowledge different items, including the veggies and fruits included in the salad dishes.

The videos and recipes were then converted to vectors, which the robot utilized to perform mathematical operations.

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By analyzing the active ingredients and observing the actions of the human chef, the robotic deduced the recipes being prepared. Out of the 16 videos it observed, the robotic determined the right recipe in 93% of the cases, even though it found only 83% of the chefs actions. The robotic exhibited the capability to recognize small variations within a recipe, recognizing them as variations rather than distinct recipes.

Many companies have built prototype robotic chefs however none are commercially offered and they lag behind people in terms of skill.

The results, the researchers argue, reveal how video content can be an important source of information for automatic food production, and could speed up the release of robotic chefs.