Chinese engineers are zeroing in on one of the loftiest goals in applied robotics: fully automated cooking.
At the buzzy World Robotics Conference in Beijing, the company Oak Deer Robotics revealed three kitchen aids designed to advance the state of kitchen automation, China Daily shared. A mix of standalone appliances and humanoid robots, the new products include a “multimodal cooking AI model” called CookingMuse, a new AI-integrated cooking robot apparatus, as well as a fully-automated food cart with a little humanoid chef called RobotCook.
According to CD, the basic cooking robot went through two live cooking demonstrations, stir-frying tofu as well as pork and green peppers. Per the company’s website, its robots are meant to prepare “Chinese stir-fry dishes,” which it does with a robotic wok capable of hitting 300 degrees Celsius, an ingredient dispensing system, as well as an AI “fully self-developed stir-frying algorithm.”
The partially state-owned Oak Deer is said to have cooking robots in over 300 cities and 4,000 stores across the country, China Entrepreneur Magazine reported last year.
Another robotics company called Hikrobots, flagged by Reuters photographers, set up a few humanoid robots within the main expo center to demonstrate basic fast-food restaurant service. Footage captured by DWS News shows the apron-clad humanoids prepping an order, by gingerly placing assorted foodstuffs into a bucket, before placing the bucket onto a serving tray.
The Hikrobots aren’t swift, but they showcase one possible future for the world of humanoid robotics.
Outside the conference hall, a robot-powered noodle shop called “Yujian Weilai” began trial operations in southwestern Beijing, per the Global Times. Said to be the city’s first fully-equipped robot noodle restaurant, it features three noodle dishes: mushroom zhajiang noodles, tomato beef brisket, and braised beef noodles.
Basically, the restaurant’s robots begin by boiling the noodles, adding broth, meat, and other toppings, while a robotic arm transfers the entree to a delivery robot. Humans are presumably still required to prep and load the ingredients every day, but the actual process of cooking and serving the food happens with minimal interference.
“What we are trying to do is turn the machine’s parameters into numbers, and use that to standardize every single bowl,” the restaurant’s general manager Li Pengzhen told GT.
While completely automated robots capable of preparing all kinds of meals remain a long way off, the swift advances in Chinese robo-chefing is clearly turning up the heat in Beijing.
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