YORI: A Hybrid Approach to Robotic Cooking

There appears to be two normal approaches to cooking automation. There’s the “let’s make a robot that can operate in a human kitchen because everyone has a human kitchen,” which looks as if a good suggestion, besides that you just then must construct your robotic to operate in human environments—which is tremendous laborious. On the opposite finish of the spectrum, there’s the “let’s make a dedicated automated system because automation is easier than robotics,” which looks as if a good suggestion, besides that you just then must be prepared to just accept compromises in recipes and texture and style as a result of making ready meals in an automatic manner merely doesn’t yield the identical outcome, as anybody who has ever tried to Cuisinart their manner out of growing some knife expertise can let you know.

The Robotics and Mechanisms Lab (RoMeLa) on the University of California, Los Angeles, run by Dennis Hong, has been engaged on a compromise strategy that leverages each robot-friendly automation and the type of human expertise that make issues style proper. Called Project YORI, which stands for “Yummy Operations Robot Initiative” and can also be the Korean phrase for “cooking,” the system combines a robot-optimized setting with a pair of arms that may function kitchen instruments kind of like a human.

“Instead of trying to mimic how humans cook,” the researchers say, “we approached the problem by thinking how cooking would be accomplished if a robot cooks. Thus the YORI system does not use the typical cooking methods, tools, or utensils which are developed for humans.” In addition to quite a lot of automated cooking methods, the instruments that YORI does use are modified to work with a tool-changing system, which largely eliminates the issue of greedy one thing like a knife effectively sufficient to exactly and repeatedly exert a considerable quantity of drive by means of it, and it additionally helps preserve issues structured and accessible.

In phrases of cooking strategies, the system takes benefit of expertise when and the place it really works higher than typical human cooking methods. For instance, with a purpose to inform whether or not elements are recent or to find out when meals is cooked ideally, YORI “utilizes unique chemical sensors,” which I assume are the robotic equivalents of a nostril and style buds and arguably would do a extra empirical evaluation than some ineffective recipe metric like “season to taste.”

The benefit of a system like that is versatility. In concept, these added robotic capabilities means it’s not as constrained by recipes you might cram right into a system constructed round automation. At the identical time, it’s considerably sensible—or at the very least, extra sensible than a robotic designed to work together with a frivolously modified human kitchen. And it’s truly designed to be sensible(ish), within the sense that it’s being developed below a partnership with Woowa Brothers, the corporate that runs the main food-delivery service in South Korea. It’s clearly nonetheless a piece in progress—you’ll be able to see a human hand sneaking in there infrequently. But the strategy appears attention-grabbing, and I hope that RoMeLa retains making progress on it, as a result of I’m hungry.