One likes a spicy curry, the other starts to water at the thought of a cream cake or tompouce. Taste is so subjective and personal that it is not obvious that the noble art of tasting could be a success beyond the human taste buds.
Yet that is what roboticists at the British University of Cambridge described on Wednesday in an article titled ‘Chew-enhanced, flavor-based classification of multi-ingredient dishes for cooking by robots’ — a feat in itself. mouth full – in the trade magazine Frontiers in Robotics and AI†
The title summarizes well what the researchers have done. They made a robot – or rather: an independent robot arm – that can taste a meal and ‘classify’ it. That is to say: telling whether, for example, there are enough herbs in it, so that the dish also tastes a bit.
Such machines have been around for some time, but what is new is that the taste has been ‘improved’ this time ‘by chewing’. This robot not only tasted the dish in its original, just-prepared state, but also variants that were in different stages of chewing.
By the way, don’t think of a kind of bird mother-with-chicks-in-her-nest scene, with someone who pre-chews a dish and then (excusefully) spits it out into the ‘mouth’ of the robot. Instead, the researchers opted for a slightly less unsavory approach. They skilfully beat the dishes together with a mixer and in this way simulated the chewing process, although of course the saliva and the enzymes contained therein were missing that our mouth normally adds to a dish while eating. The robot was then allowed to taste the dish at different chewing stages, which in practice came down to inserting a sensor into the food. In this way he mapped the salt content of the dish.
Incidentally, the machine had cooked that dish itself (hence: ‘cooking by robots’). Not a culinary masterpiece of star allure, by the way, but just scrambled eggs with tomato. The ‘several ingredients’ from the specialist article therefore appear to be a modest number in practice. With a pinch of salt you get to three. The researchers did not use butter or oil for frying.
It turned out that by ‘tasting’ not only the dish, but also the chewed variants, the robot was able to determine much more accurately how much salt was in the food.
This is handy to be able to do, the researchers think, because human cooks also regularly taste whether all the flavors are in balance while preparing dishes. It is hoped that if robots in the future can check whether a dish tastes good in a similar way, they will probably also become better cooks. We just have to teach them how to cook with more than just egg, tomato and salt.