[L’industrie c’est fou] A robot chef trained by watching YouTube tutorials

2023-06-08 05:30:00

The YouTube channels dedicated to gastronomy, which accumulate millions of subscribers, will surely soon have, among their biggest fans… Cooking robots! In any case, this is what researchers from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom want, who have published a study going in this direction in the month of May. They designed a robot chef capable of learning new recipes by watching videos of humans cooking. The automaton thus enriches its culinary palette without the engineers having to program it so that it concocts specific dishes, which is very expensive.

To achieve this, they first programmed their machine so that it could simmer eight different types of salads. Then they trained her, using a neural network and computer vision, to recognize the ingredients and utensils used in each of the recipes by making her watch videos of the researchers who cooked them. The goal was also for the robot to be able to identify the arms, hands and faces of scientists to observe their actions.

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“We wanted to see if we could train a robot cook to learn the same way humans do, by identifying ingredients and how they come together in the dish,” said Grzegorz Sochacki, one of the authors of the study. ‘study. Across sixteen videos, the robot identified the correct recipe 93% of the time even though it could only recognize human actions 83% of the time.

A ninth recipe reproduced

“It was very effective in recognizing, for example, that two apples cut into pieces and two carrots cut into pieces are the same recipe as three apples cut into pieces and three carrots cut into pieces”, enthused Grzegorz Sochacki. The robot was also able to identify a ninth recipe and reproduce it.

But, for the time being, he absolutely does not know how to reconstitute the recipes observed in the cooking videos circulating on social networks, which are far too fast and rich for him. Cooking robots with a recipe book much fuller than that of researchers at the University of Cambridge already exist, such as that of Moley Robotics. A real cordon bleu, but at 280,000 euros per machine… You will need to butter your spinach before buying it!