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. At the end of the experiment, the robot came up with a ninth recipe on its own.
Using computer vision techniques, the robot analysed each frame of video and was able to identify the different objects and features, such as a knife and the ingredients. Of the 16 videos it watched, the robot recognised the correct recipe 93% of the time, even though it only detected 83% of the human chef’s actions.
Grzegorz Sochacki from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, said: “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.
“It’s amazing how much nuance the robot was able to detect. These recipes aren’t complex – they’re essentially chopped fruits and vegetables, but it was really effective at recognising, for example, that two chopped apples and two chopped carrots is the same recipe as three chopped apples and three chopped carrots.”