Coming home to the sight of a robot cooking your meal might be a plausible scenario if a London-based company has its way. Moley Robotics is developing a dexterous robot equipped with an iTunes-style recipe library boasting more than 2,000 dishes.
The company presented its prototype (Hall 17 Stand E84) at the Hannover Messe industrial robotics show in Germany. At the centre of the technology are fully articulate hands featuring 24 joints, 20 motors and nearly 130 sensors. The intricate hands were developed in collaboration with Shadow Robot Company, which has created products for the nuclear industry along with NASA.
Moley’s main challenge was developing a robot that cooked less like a machine and more like a human being. In order to accomplish this, the developers summoned MasterChef winner Tim Anderson. They 3-D recorded the reality chef while he created meals, including tiny details such as the way in which he stirred the liquids and how he controlled the hob’s temperature.
The company transformed his actions into digital movements using a custom-made algorithm developed with the University of Connecticut and SSSUP Pisa in Italy. They also asked Anderson to develop a dish that would test the robot’s capabilities.
“To be honest, I didn’t think this was possible,” Anderson said in a statement. “I chose crab bisque as a dish because it’s a real challenge for human chefs to make well, never mind a machine. Having seen – and tasted – the results for myself, I am stunned. This is the beginning of something really significant: a whole new opportunity for producing good food and for people to explore the world’s cuisines.”
Moley Robotics is currently working on scaling the technology so that it can be ready for mass production and integrated into domestic kitchens. This means developing smaller control arms and adding appliances such as a refrigerator and a dishwasher. The tech maker hopes its robotic kitchen will hit the market by 2017. Until then, we’ll have to settle for making our meals the old-fashioned way.