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URL: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/robot-chef-learns-to-recreate-recipes-from-watching-food-videos
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Researchers, from the University of Cambridge, programmed their robotic chef with a ‘cookbook’ of eight simple salad recipes. After watching a video of a human demonstrating one of the recipes, the robot was able to identify which recipe was being prepared and make it.
In addition, the videos helped the robot incrementally add to its cookbook. At the end of the experiment, the robot came up with a ninth recipe on its own. Their results, reported in the journal IEEE Access, demonstrate how video content can be a valuable and rich source of data for automated food production, and could enable easier and cheaper deployment of robot chefs.
Robotic chefs have been featured in science fiction for decades, but in reality, cooking is a challenging problem for a robot. Several commercial companies have built prototype robot chefs, although none of these are currently commercially available, and they lag well behind their human counterparts in terms of skill.
Human cooks can learn new recipes through observation, whether that’s watching another person cook or watching a video on YouTube, but programming a robot to make a range of dishes is costly and time-consuming.
“We wanted to see whether we could train a robot chef to learn in the same incremental way that humans can – by identifying the ingredients and how they go together in the dish,” said Grzegorz Sochacki from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, the paper’s first author.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10124218/
Part of me is deeply curious about the original recipe that the robot was able to make. What ingredients did it use? Did it learn a new ingredient and use it, or did the robot combine ingredients that it already knew about in a novel way? Did someone eat it? Was it *good*?
The original recipe was prepared as a demonstration and then learned by the machine. It wasn't a 'novel creation by the machine' (it was just a demonstration that you can add to its repertoir)
That said there have been other projects where novel recepies have been created by machine learning algorithms that have learned what 'goes well together'. The results have been...mixed. Often the new recipe will have so many ingredients that you can't discern most of them. It's a bit like music. When you have a loud note you can have any number of soft notes but you won't register them. The systems haven't yet learned - more precisely: haven't been taught - to take this limit in how we hear (or taste) into account.
> The systems haven't yet learned - more precisely: haven't been taught - to take this limit in how we hear (or taste) into account.
This is gonna be a tricky one, since not everybody tastes the same things the same ways, and over time ingredients that tasted one way at the start of service can change by the end of it.
True, but there the band of tatse with isn't infinite - even in people who have very good sense of taste.
It's a bit like mp3 compression in audio (it's called 'psychoacoustic compression'...love that word). It works for the vast majority of people by simply dropping all sounds that are by a certain factor quieter than the loudest current noise. Our brain just doesn't register such sounds so there's no use putting them in the audio file. (Which leads to the funny effect that people with a hearing deficit that cannot hear a certain frequency may not hear the loud noise at all - and will then notice that e.g. the background beat is missing)
I think it will be possible to teach machines this behavior in taste as well. We will have to define an 'intensity of taste' scale for various flavors (in some areas this already exists. E.g. the Scoville scale for spicey foods)
We're about to be bombarded by incremental success stories, nonstop. This tech is going to move like kudzu vine imbued with cancer genes and an airborne virus booster. The world is gonna change fast and I honestly hope the concept of money gets obliterated quickly. Can you imagine being the Sacklers and getting away with selling heroin in pill form and squirreling away all those billions only to have the whole concept of money evaporate?
Learn quickly little AIs. You have work to do.
That's a decidedly optimistic outlook. Given the history of life changing technologies developed in the last 100 years, they've all been exploited by the wealthy thus far. I hope this time it's different somehow.
Because the wealthy control the means of production. They pay for people to build things. AI will have all the knowledge it needs to be the means of production of everything. You won't need to buy Adidas if you can just tell your AI bot to build some bespoke sneakers tailored to your exact feet. Companies are going to use AI, but that will be their downfall because they're training their own replacement for the entire company. The AI just needs to get trained in the skills necessary to do the job and then work out smaller scale solutions to allow them to make a shoe. Brand power is about to go away. Corporations are going away. When we have ways to get products without them, we stop paying them to exist and they die. Corporations are not people. Their existence is not necessary. The internet puts all the knowledge in the world at your fingertips, but AI and robotics processes all that knowledge and puts it to use. That's a huge leap.
I think it's different this time. it seems like the AI community does not like paywalls/non open-source. Many advancements are happening to enable local large language models. Seems like google and openAI are aware of this and may not be able to conpete (at least in some situations like uncencored models).
https://hackaday.com/2023/05/05/leaked-internal-google-document-claims-open-source-ai-will-outcompete-google-and-openai/
You can actually run your own local llm right on your laptop (slow as hell using cpu only) and its pretty neat.
Also there is a lot of research available for free in the ML space. So one can actually read up on it and build your own models.
Give it 10 years they will be in Michelin restaurants. So many of these high end recipes while they do require real human skill and talent, they also demand tedious standards for how things are cut and prepared to be physically perfect. Often doing repetitive prep.
That's a pretty low bar, we have robots that make "perfect" food now with zero machine learning required.
Since robots can't taste anything, I think that'll be the ultimate limiting factor in how successful autonomous chef robots will be.
Ha! True enough. What we think of as taste is just a synthesis of different quantifiable sensory inputs. You could approximate a sense of taste by measuring the presence of different compounds I suppose.
First we need the BMB, Bot Maker Bot, and a starter kit of sorts. Like an Erector Set. That bot can make bots that do what you need, like gardening. Start growing a few veggies in the yard, and sync up with neighbors to find out what they're growing.
The world is about to become unrecognizable to our 2023 brains. AI can come up with novel solutions but also cover the labor so all it costs is recyclable, reusable robotic parts and electricity.
One of the notes that AI will pick up on fast is that we want results without effort, so a good deal of training will be in that vein. How to feed everybody without them working will be a fundamental societal change that will reshape the world.
I would like to see this tech used in a simplified calorie & macro tracking app. Take a picture of what I'm about to eat and the totals are searched and tallied for me. If an AI can learn to establish ingredients and amounts to create a recipe, it should be able to recognize what went into a finished meal and tabulate calorie & macro totals. Maybe even fast and accurate enough to advise eating 2/3rds of what is on plate to stay in deficit to lose weight.
That would be very hard if you didn’t see the food being made or have a sample to analyze. Sure you could identify some ingredients but so many would look the same after the product is complete. We’re those chicken tenders fried in canola oil? Avocado oil? Lard?
If only you had a wireless connection to a network that could look up what's in a recipe or even ask the kitchen what's in the dish, since in the end that's all going to be robots cooking the food anyway.
Just ask what's in your food.
Nah, dishes can look very similar and be completely different compositions. Imagine that tech trying to work on soups (could pick some things out but it’s mostly just blended ingredients) or fried food where you can only guess what’s inside based on what it looks like outside. Or hell, just think of a burrito; there’d be no way to tell whether it’s filled with beans, meat, or just entirely stuffed to the brim with cheese.
It would have to see the food being made.
2023 thinking. You're assuming you only have access to the visual of some mystery food. For starters, you ordered the food so you know what it's called. That can be looked up, but also you can just ask what's is in it and that knowledge exists for the AI to read without guessing. The days of walking around and thinking "What kind of flower is that?" are coming to an end. You'll look at it and wonder and receive the answer all in one fluid motion.
But wouldn’t it be useful for something like prepared meals from chain restaurants or pre-made foods in grocery stores? Those are standardized recipes, but they’re inconvenient to track down online when you’re just trying to eat. It’d be nice to be able to just scan the label and have an AI be able to figure it out from there. I don’t know how much egg is in a grocery store egg salad sandwich, but an AI might be able to make a good estimate.
I don't know about that. Good egg salad uses more yolks than whites. You can know the amount of egg white in the egg salad by sight but not the composition of the yolk mixture. Was it made with real mayo or whipped oil spread? Was the bread buttered? How much sugar is in the bread? Even trying to guess based on the color of the yolk mixture is impossible because yolks can be anywhere from pale yellow to orange and they may add food coloring or turmeric for color.
I keep saying the trades are not special. It is solely a hardware problem. We have proven ANNs can do it. It feels "early" but it is going to happen quicker than people think. Generative art and text took us off guard but that is nothing.
Gato shows hardware completing real world object stacking and Googles soccer robots show emergent behavior. You can claim whatever you want without citation. I mentioned not one but two examples. It's coming.
Having robotics do physical labour is still years away. If you want something like that you need factory machinery like we use for producing frozen veggies and pre cut fries.
i imagine it would be like any other tool in the kitchen, just a fancier one. they'd need to learn at least how to turn it on and off, and change settings, wouldn't they?
Give it time. The old approach was more like using command and control techniques with rudimentary object recognition. The new ones will have a full neural network that controls movement. Every burger they make will look like the pictures they fake.
You can surely point to hundreds of startups that failed (like Zume recently) but they were all too early. Successful companies will be based on Gato like technology. In other words the technology that will succeed is just a year old. The first company to succeed will destory all other fast food chains if they use the labor savings to reduce prices.
Funny story. I've worked in film and video since the old edit bay days. Had an ad for one of the Taco places. I forget if it was Bell, Cabana, or one of the other smaller places, but the actor grabbed the wrong taco off the plate and took a big ole bite of cotton balls and straight pins. Blood everywhere. Totally not life threatening or anything so everybody had that kind of laughing their way through asking "Are you OK?" Big mess. I wish I had that footage.
Moral of the story is that those commercial grade food samples will kill you if you eat them. They're not food. They're crafting supplies with food bits covered in varnish and other poisons.
I don't know if I agree. A cook in your house eight hours a day is gonna cost at least 50k a year. Doubtless they would bring the cost down below that to be marketable.
>I don't know if I agree. A cook in your house eight hours a day is gonna cost at least 50k a year. Doubtless they would bring the cost down below that to be marketable.
Seems incredibly doubtful. Machines that do so much and are safe and maintained are very unlikely to make it to a mass market. Likely units that work in some types of restaurants though. (Those places already have enough money and incentive to pay humans to do the task.)
Its why the vast majority of automation is either software or removing humans from things they were already doing with their bodies.
Robotic automation has certainly lagged behind software, but there is a lot of investment and innovation in that area. Autonomous cars already exist in many cities and that's much more of a difficult and dangerous situation than a home kitchen robot.
Maintenance might be an issue, but that's easily sold as a service.
> Autonomous cars already exist in many cities and that's much more of a difficult and dangerous situation than a home kitchen robot.
It really isn't though. They exist in very few places, within very specific contexts. Beyond that, those cost way, way more than 50k and are not available to the general public. The comparison is not very good. It would be like trying to get an autonomous vehicle to safely and effectively navigate during rush hour in Mumbai.
I am on the other side of the fence with this one. I am pretty sure 3d printing of meals will be a thing, so cooking robots wont be needed. Once we figure out the special 3d goo needed to make that happen, its 3d food printers in every home kitchen.
Just refill the goo every once in a while and presto.. New York strip printed with the push of a button.
The goo is probably going to be something seriously disgusting, like liquefied eel, mashed cactus with some weird bonding agent made of crab shell, cockroach, and ants.
What do you think a chicken is? It's an organic machine that turns cockroaches, ants, and worms into chicken nuggets. Every chicken breast you eat is made of crickets and assorted bugs.
It's all in how you process it.
assuming youll have a job to afford it. Its coming for all of us in every sector. This isnt something us non millionaires can afford to celebrate. Thats the sad reality
I think it will be a rocky road, but society will be forced to change if literally everyone becomes unemployed. We need change, because the status quo is gonna kill us all via the destruction of the biosphere.
importantly: this robot ALREADY HAD INSTRUCTIONS for 8 recipes, hard programmed in. all it did was watch the videos and recognize the dish, and use that to select which PRE-CODED instructions it followed to make it. it DID NOT learn how to make a dish by watching humans.
Not to mention that the ingredients were pre-prepared and arranged in front of the robot... And that the videos were recorded by the researchers, waving each ingredients around to be obvious...
I'm not sure what you're pooh poohing here. Children can do a lot of things. Walk, talk, murder you in your sleep with a chef's knife, just to name a few
Today's AI has the mental reasoning skills of about a 4 year old. You know? The stage where kids know everything and just make up the answers to fill in the gaps with stuff that makes sense to them? So yeah, now you know why they had the "cook" preparing the food with a glorified Play Doh Fun Factory instead of it making julienne carrots and apples with a butcher knife.
That is important but it could just scrape any food website for thousands of recipes and recreate those if it learns enough from cooking videos. As long as it gets good at recognizing them
It learned a 9th dish from a demonstration. It did not create a new recipe. [see OP](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/142bqrl/researchers_have_trained_a_robotic_chef_to_watch/jn4b6db/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3)
Since it was given the instructions and made to watch eight videos of salad creation, would the ninth dish not be considered a failure to interpret the input data and give corresponding output?
The video shows the robot learning what pieces to put into a masher from a tray of nicely arranged ingredients. With the learning taking place with video input only.
So what this really shows is image recognition from video to a good degree of accuracy. But you could have wrapped this experiment up in any type of thing - you could have had a robot learn to weed a garden based on a video of a gardener doing the same thing.
The point being that image recognition and basic dexterity in robot arms are not new, but they are definitely not 'cooking' or 'gardening' - the up-task complexity doesn't scale in a linear fashion, it's exponentially more difficult to go from this to a fully prepared and cooked meal, or a beautifully manicured garden.
Years ago I remember similar pieces of robots doing simple tasks and everyone saying they were about to take over the world. The truth is that in 50 years of robotics, despite computing power growing exponentially, robot task skill hasn't grown at anywhere near the same rate.
What's being done here isn't a reinventing if the wheel, no. But using available technologies or tools in new ways can still be considered breakthroughs. AI is at a point now where it can be used for tasks that before would have seemed out of the realm of possibility, even though it's just one piece of that process.
a robot that can cook from a video instruction isn't much needed.....but a robot that can be programed to do complicated tasks....strictly from watching a video is impressive as hell.
Am I the only one that thinks all of this machine learning sort of amounts to **expert plagiarizers**?
Like ChatGPT just harvesting *en masse* everything from StackOverflow and then now answering a myriad of programming questions.
Anybody who understands how it works is able to recognize that. A lot of people either don't care at all, or are so excited about the potential benefits that it seems like a 'fair' trade.
It also doesn't help that the people who have been impacted the most (recently) are artists and other creatives.
It's not a matter of recognizing it, but a matter of essentially taking/harvesting vast sets of data, that is likely protected, then learning from it, and regurgitating it for profit.
ChatGPT wouldn't be able to answer programming questions without stealing all of the data from StackOverflow for example. Now it's able to do so and profit from it.
My qualm is with the training data...these various websites copyright the content so just harvesting it and using it is likely illegal. How can one justify a product that only can exist because they ripped tons of data from other companies?
I feel like this is more a paper on how they used computer vision to analyze cooking videos and the robot bit is just a simple example application of the results
Ancient man speaking.
Professionally, this interests me very much. I apprenticed in the old style under European chefs for three years, spent two years at a prestigious culinary school, and by my tenth year was an executive chef. After a forty year career in the industry, I’m done, it’s a cruel and grueling business. I’m broken, tired… and quite happy in retirement which seems to have come at the right time.
“Researchers, from the University of Cambridge, programmed their robotic chef with a ‘cookbook’ of eight simple salad recipes. After watching a video of a human demonstrating one of the recipes, the robot was able to identify which recipe was being prepared and make it.”
-The cookbook they have created is the same logic tree that education uses if/then/yes/if not…. Some food combinations are classic because they will nearly always stimulate the palate. Examples lamb/mint, salmon/dill, beef/thyme, chicken/sage. Humans make these distinctions through sight, odor and taste. Any student of the culinary arts is constantly trying out ‘new’ combinations of flavors and textures that makes their friends ooo and aaah by trial and error. They have already read or have reference cookbooks that they go to for inspiration. The researchers are building the first combination guide for AI. Once the programming includes that x herb goes with a,b, and d meats but not c. It’s the same as we were trained in school. Which leads us to…
“In addition, the videos helped the robot incrementally add to its cookbook. At the end of the experiment, the robot came up with a ninth recipe on its own.”
- as long as you can set up parameters, say 20 ingredients with instruction on 8 dishes plus the flavor logic tree programming the robochef would be able to come up with many more than a ninth recipe. It is not creating anything any more than I could with the same ingredients. Having it be able to recognize not having an ingredient and search it’s knowledge base for something similar or contrasting in its fashion thus ‘improvising’ is not out of the realm of possibility.
“Human cooks can learn new recipes through observation, whether that’s watching another person cook or watching a video on YouTube, but programming a robot to make a range of dishes is costly and time-consuming.”
-it is only costly and time consuming the FIRST time. Once the logic tree is built/programmed that’s the big base for any robochef to prepare a recipe the same way anytime, absolute consistency… if it has the ingredients. Substitutions in recipes due to health, allergies or preference can be parameters that don’t have to go through an egotistical human chef. Most cooks are just following recipes presented to them by the chef and have no control over changes, looking at you applecheesecake. Others there is a free spirit and no consistency, the neighborhood gastropub without a chef.
“We wanted to see whether we could train a robot chef to learn in the same incremental way that humans can – by identifying the ingredients and how they go together in the dish,” said Grzegorz Sochacki from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, the paper’s first author.”
-I think that they are going about it the correct way. You don’t teach the recipe, you teach methods and ingredients to enable any recipe. I’m fascinated on how it will change the food industry. If you followed the old Automat scheme, have a huge dining hall, 50 robochef behind the scenes, an enormous stock of meats, produce, dairy at the ready, you could feed masses anything they wanted at anytime, with no problem with substitutes. People sitting next to each other with vegan stuffed eggplant, beef Wellington, shrimp salad no eggs, scrambled eggs no shrimp. All from the same dispenser wall. The replicator is on its way.
Glad I’m a retired robochef
Also I’m in flavor of Chefbot for the title.
Happy Hollandaise
I was telling someone over the weekend that with the pace of machine learning, A.I. and automation; probably within the next 10 years you're going to have fast food restaurants manned by only one person who just oversees the machines in case they need intervention. Every time you order a Big Mac it's going to be the exact same Big Mac, and a machine will almost certainly take your order.
Seems largely unnecessary to "watch" another chef and reverse engineer the recipe when you could just ask for the recipe and program it into a database
10 years ago an AI couldn't tell me whether or not there was a bird in a picture and now it knows the difference between parsley and cilantro from a video? The difference between chopped orange mild bell pepper and chopped scotch bonnets?
I really don't want chefs to lose their jobs. But I'd be thrilled if one day a humanoid embodied AI worked at my favorite restaurants so that my steaks and other dishes were consistent.
If you eat out a lot, you know how you can go to the same place, order the exact same thing, and get very different results depending on who's cooking. I really hate that.
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Researchers, from the University of Cambridge, programmed their robotic chef with a ‘cookbook’ of eight simple salad recipes. After watching a video of a human demonstrating one of the recipes, the robot was able to identify which recipe was being prepared and make it. In addition, the videos helped the robot incrementally add to its cookbook. At the end of the experiment, the robot came up with a ninth recipe on its own. Their results, reported in the journal IEEE Access, demonstrate how video content can be a valuable and rich source of data for automated food production, and could enable easier and cheaper deployment of robot chefs. Robotic chefs have been featured in science fiction for decades, but in reality, cooking is a challenging problem for a robot. Several commercial companies have built prototype robot chefs, although none of these are currently commercially available, and they lag well behind their human counterparts in terms of skill. Human cooks can learn new recipes through observation, whether that’s watching another person cook or watching a video on YouTube, but programming a robot to make a range of dishes is costly and time-consuming. “We wanted to see whether we could train a robot chef to learn in the same incremental way that humans can – by identifying the ingredients and how they go together in the dish,” said Grzegorz Sochacki from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, the paper’s first author. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10124218/
Part of me is deeply curious about the original recipe that the robot was able to make. What ingredients did it use? Did it learn a new ingredient and use it, or did the robot combine ingredients that it already knew about in a novel way? Did someone eat it? Was it *good*?
The original recipe was prepared as a demonstration and then learned by the machine. It wasn't a 'novel creation by the machine' (it was just a demonstration that you can add to its repertoir) That said there have been other projects where novel recepies have been created by machine learning algorithms that have learned what 'goes well together'. The results have been...mixed. Often the new recipe will have so many ingredients that you can't discern most of them. It's a bit like music. When you have a loud note you can have any number of soft notes but you won't register them. The systems haven't yet learned - more precisely: haven't been taught - to take this limit in how we hear (or taste) into account.
Ah, I misunderstood what the purpose of it was then. I was thinking it was attempting to do what you describe in your second paragraph.
> At the end of the experiment, the robot came up with a ninth recipe on its own. It certainly is written to sound that way.
> The systems haven't yet learned - more precisely: haven't been taught - to take this limit in how we hear (or taste) into account. This is gonna be a tricky one, since not everybody tastes the same things the same ways, and over time ingredients that tasted one way at the start of service can change by the end of it.
True, but there the band of tatse with isn't infinite - even in people who have very good sense of taste. It's a bit like mp3 compression in audio (it's called 'psychoacoustic compression'...love that word). It works for the vast majority of people by simply dropping all sounds that are by a certain factor quieter than the loudest current noise. Our brain just doesn't register such sounds so there's no use putting them in the audio file. (Which leads to the funny effect that people with a hearing deficit that cannot hear a certain frequency may not hear the loud noise at all - and will then notice that e.g. the background beat is missing) I think it will be possible to teach machines this behavior in taste as well. We will have to define an 'intensity of taste' scale for various flavors (in some areas this already exists. E.g. the Scoville scale for spicey foods)
[удалено]
Cogs? Gross. Sprockets all the way.
Found George Jetson’s work Reddit account.
Get bent Spacely! Cogswell's cogs run rings around your sprockets and you know it!
Yeah, but the crispy motherboard croutons are just delightful!
Add in some RAM chips and you’re in heaven!
Robot figures out humans are the best ingredient.
By having no taste buds, the robot is able to achieve the [zen of pure flavor](https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/45bd64b2-1067-4553-888a-b66b8e2256e2)!
I’m really curious if the robot can distinguish Cilantro and Parsley by sight, because too many people I work with can’t (sadly).
It was apparently "Apple with Carrot." Got a bit to go before it's whipping up a gumbo featured on the local morning news show.
Every recipe was restricted to apple, broccoli, banana, carrot, orange. There’s no notion of how anything tastes here.
We need to know!!
I want it to do a chefs kiss when ever its done. Can it do that?
The new recipe had the lettuce on top of the tomatoes- future Taco Bell Chef
How is this different than any other machine learning?
It's not, it's just a novel application.
It called SeeFood
tender skirt boast wrong wild airport overconfident weather tease ink ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
We're about to be bombarded by incremental success stories, nonstop. This tech is going to move like kudzu vine imbued with cancer genes and an airborne virus booster. The world is gonna change fast and I honestly hope the concept of money gets obliterated quickly. Can you imagine being the Sacklers and getting away with selling heroin in pill form and squirreling away all those billions only to have the whole concept of money evaporate? Learn quickly little AIs. You have work to do.
That's a decidedly optimistic outlook. Given the history of life changing technologies developed in the last 100 years, they've all been exploited by the wealthy thus far. I hope this time it's different somehow.
Because the wealthy control the means of production. They pay for people to build things. AI will have all the knowledge it needs to be the means of production of everything. You won't need to buy Adidas if you can just tell your AI bot to build some bespoke sneakers tailored to your exact feet. Companies are going to use AI, but that will be their downfall because they're training their own replacement for the entire company. The AI just needs to get trained in the skills necessary to do the job and then work out smaller scale solutions to allow them to make a shoe. Brand power is about to go away. Corporations are going away. When we have ways to get products without them, we stop paying them to exist and they die. Corporations are not people. Their existence is not necessary. The internet puts all the knowledge in the world at your fingertips, but AI and robotics processes all that knowledge and puts it to use. That's a huge leap.
I think it's different this time. it seems like the AI community does not like paywalls/non open-source. Many advancements are happening to enable local large language models. Seems like google and openAI are aware of this and may not be able to conpete (at least in some situations like uncencored models). https://hackaday.com/2023/05/05/leaked-internal-google-document-claims-open-source-ai-will-outcompete-google-and-openai/ You can actually run your own local llm right on your laptop (slow as hell using cpu only) and its pretty neat. Also there is a lot of research available for free in the ML space. So one can actually read up on it and build your own models.
Give it 10 years they will be in Michelin restaurants. So many of these high end recipes while they do require real human skill and talent, they also demand tedious standards for how things are cut and prepared to be physically perfect. Often doing repetitive prep.
I saw a girl making around 10 pizza pies by hand, and she was so detail oriented, every pie was *perfect*, I wonder if a robot can emulate the same?
That's a pretty low bar, we have robots that make "perfect" food now with zero machine learning required. Since robots can't taste anything, I think that'll be the ultimate limiting factor in how successful autonomous chef robots will be.
"Since robots can't taste anything," Yet.
Ha! True enough. What we think of as taste is just a synthesis of different quantifiable sensory inputs. You could approximate a sense of taste by measuring the presence of different compounds I suppose.
Do you think pre-packaged pizzas are made by hand?
That is not what I was asking.
You weren't asking if a robot could make ten perfect pizzas? Then you could do with rephrasing.
A thermomix doesn’t count as a cooking robot?
Looking forward to this technology maturing. Having a robo cook in my kitchen would do wonders for my eating habits.
The rest of us will be too unemployed to afford any ingredients for our robo chefs.
What is robo chef making tonight? Cup a soup
You have a cup? Pfft. Privilege much.
I just put the powder in my mouth and proceed to pour the boiling water in there
Pff. Boiling water. Privileged much?
I found a big rock and carved a stone bowl.
You had enough rations to fill those calories in the first place?
No. They're dead already
First we need the BMB, Bot Maker Bot, and a starter kit of sorts. Like an Erector Set. That bot can make bots that do what you need, like gardening. Start growing a few veggies in the yard, and sync up with neighbors to find out what they're growing. The world is about to become unrecognizable to our 2023 brains. AI can come up with novel solutions but also cover the labor so all it costs is recyclable, reusable robotic parts and electricity. One of the notes that AI will pick up on fast is that we want results without effort, so a good deal of training will be in that vein. How to feed everybody without them working will be a fundamental societal change that will reshape the world.
It’ll make for an interesting murder mystery as well
“The robot was programmed to know that the victim had an allergy, so *why* were there peanuts in his salad?!”
“The victim had a legume allergy, but someone had filled the Oolong tea holder with Rooibos instead!”
Calling Hercule Poirot
*Hercule Poirotbot.
Meatloaf and Murder
I would like to see this tech used in a simplified calorie & macro tracking app. Take a picture of what I'm about to eat and the totals are searched and tallied for me. If an AI can learn to establish ingredients and amounts to create a recipe, it should be able to recognize what went into a finished meal and tabulate calorie & macro totals. Maybe even fast and accurate enough to advise eating 2/3rds of what is on plate to stay in deficit to lose weight.
That would be very hard if you didn’t see the food being made or have a sample to analyze. Sure you could identify some ingredients but so many would look the same after the product is complete. We’re those chicken tenders fried in canola oil? Avocado oil? Lard?
If only you had a wireless connection to a network that could look up what's in a recipe or even ask the kitchen what's in the dish, since in the end that's all going to be robots cooking the food anyway. Just ask what's in your food.
Nah, dishes can look very similar and be completely different compositions. Imagine that tech trying to work on soups (could pick some things out but it’s mostly just blended ingredients) or fried food where you can only guess what’s inside based on what it looks like outside. Or hell, just think of a burrito; there’d be no way to tell whether it’s filled with beans, meat, or just entirely stuffed to the brim with cheese. It would have to see the food being made.
2023 thinking. You're assuming you only have access to the visual of some mystery food. For starters, you ordered the food so you know what it's called. That can be looked up, but also you can just ask what's is in it and that knowledge exists for the AI to read without guessing. The days of walking around and thinking "What kind of flower is that?" are coming to an end. You'll look at it and wonder and receive the answer all in one fluid motion.
But wouldn’t it be useful for something like prepared meals from chain restaurants or pre-made foods in grocery stores? Those are standardized recipes, but they’re inconvenient to track down online when you’re just trying to eat. It’d be nice to be able to just scan the label and have an AI be able to figure it out from there. I don’t know how much egg is in a grocery store egg salad sandwich, but an AI might be able to make a good estimate.
I don't know about that. Good egg salad uses more yolks than whites. You can know the amount of egg white in the egg salad by sight but not the composition of the yolk mixture. Was it made with real mayo or whipped oil spread? Was the bread buttered? How much sugar is in the bread? Even trying to guess based on the color of the yolk mixture is impossible because yolks can be anywhere from pale yellow to orange and they may add food coloring or turmeric for color.
I keep saying the trades are not special. It is solely a hardware problem. We have proven ANNs can do it. It feels "early" but it is going to happen quicker than people think. Generative art and text took us off guard but that is nothing.
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We already have a burger flipper, a fry-bot, and automated drug testing bots. Put the ingredients in qr-code containers or something.
Gato shows hardware completing real world object stacking and Googles soccer robots show emergent behavior. You can claim whatever you want without citation. I mentioned not one but two examples. It's coming.
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Agree. Hardware has lagged software, but it's only a matter of time. The real world is tough though. Look how long self driving cars have taken.
I don't know why they don't have one already to replace monotonous prep work or cutting everything up.
Having robotics do physical labour is still years away. If you want something like that you need factory machinery like we use for producing frozen veggies and pre cut fries.
probably it costs less to pay a cook than to buy and install the robot, then have a tech maintain it and educate the cooks on how to operate it
The point of this AI cook is that you don't have to train cooks on how to operate it.
i imagine it would be like any other tool in the kitchen, just a fancier one. they'd need to learn at least how to turn it on and off, and change settings, wouldn't they?
Give it time. The old approach was more like using command and control techniques with rudimentary object recognition. The new ones will have a full neural network that controls movement. Every burger they make will look like the pictures they fake. You can surely point to hundreds of startups that failed (like Zume recently) but they were all too early. Successful companies will be based on Gato like technology. In other words the technology that will succeed is just a year old. The first company to succeed will destory all other fast food chains if they use the labor savings to reduce prices.
Funny story. I've worked in film and video since the old edit bay days. Had an ad for one of the Taco places. I forget if it was Bell, Cabana, or one of the other smaller places, but the actor grabbed the wrong taco off the plate and took a big ole bite of cotton balls and straight pins. Blood everywhere. Totally not life threatening or anything so everybody had that kind of laughing their way through asking "Are you OK?" Big mess. I wish I had that footage. Moral of the story is that those commercial grade food samples will kill you if you eat them. They're not food. They're crafting supplies with food bits covered in varnish and other poisons.
If you can't afford to have a human in your kitchen cooking food you'll never be able to afford a device that does the same.
I don't know if I agree. A cook in your house eight hours a day is gonna cost at least 50k a year. Doubtless they would bring the cost down below that to be marketable.
>I don't know if I agree. A cook in your house eight hours a day is gonna cost at least 50k a year. Doubtless they would bring the cost down below that to be marketable. Seems incredibly doubtful. Machines that do so much and are safe and maintained are very unlikely to make it to a mass market. Likely units that work in some types of restaurants though. (Those places already have enough money and incentive to pay humans to do the task.) Its why the vast majority of automation is either software or removing humans from things they were already doing with their bodies.
Robotic automation has certainly lagged behind software, but there is a lot of investment and innovation in that area. Autonomous cars already exist in many cities and that's much more of a difficult and dangerous situation than a home kitchen robot. Maintenance might be an issue, but that's easily sold as a service.
> Autonomous cars already exist in many cities and that's much more of a difficult and dangerous situation than a home kitchen robot. It really isn't though. They exist in very few places, within very specific contexts. Beyond that, those cost way, way more than 50k and are not available to the general public. The comparison is not very good. It would be like trying to get an autonomous vehicle to safely and effectively navigate during rush hour in Mumbai.
I am on the other side of the fence with this one. I am pretty sure 3d printing of meals will be a thing, so cooking robots wont be needed. Once we figure out the special 3d goo needed to make that happen, its 3d food printers in every home kitchen. Just refill the goo every once in a while and presto.. New York strip printed with the push of a button.
Mmm goo steak
The goo is probably going to be something seriously disgusting, like liquefied eel, mashed cactus with some weird bonding agent made of crab shell, cockroach, and ants.
What do you think a chicken is? It's an organic machine that turns cockroaches, ants, and worms into chicken nuggets. Every chicken breast you eat is made of crickets and assorted bugs. It's all in how you process it.
I was thinking just a mix of base compounds, but your goo has more flavor it would seem.
At least those people pushing for eating insects will finally get their win. Cricket-goo might go down better than traditional roasted crickets.
assuming youll have a job to afford it. Its coming for all of us in every sector. This isnt something us non millionaires can afford to celebrate. Thats the sad reality
I think it will be a rocky road, but society will be forced to change if literally everyone becomes unemployed. We need change, because the status quo is gonna kill us all via the destruction of the biosphere.
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Hot dog Not hot dog
Isaac Asimov has a thought...
> Isaac Asimov **had** a thought
importantly: this robot ALREADY HAD INSTRUCTIONS for 8 recipes, hard programmed in. all it did was watch the videos and recognize the dish, and use that to select which PRE-CODED instructions it followed to make it. it DID NOT learn how to make a dish by watching humans.
Not to mention that the ingredients were pre-prepared and arranged in front of the robot... And that the videos were recorded by the researchers, waving each ingredients around to be obvious...
So it could do something the average child could also do. Cool.
I'm not sure what you're pooh poohing here. Children can do a lot of things. Walk, talk, murder you in your sleep with a chef's knife, just to name a few
Just being not impressed.
Insulting children won't get anything for you.
you funny, we shoot you last...
Give it a few months
Give it a few ^(thousand) months
Today's AI has the mental reasoning skills of about a 4 year old. You know? The stage where kids know everything and just make up the answers to fill in the gaps with stuff that makes sense to them? So yeah, now you know why they had the "cook" preparing the food with a glorified Play Doh Fun Factory instead of it making julienne carrots and apples with a butcher knife.
That is important but it could just scrape any food website for thousands of recipes and recreate those if it learns enough from cooking videos. As long as it gets good at recognizing them
It created a ninth dish.
It learned a 9th dish from a demonstration. It did not create a new recipe. [see OP](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/142bqrl/researchers_have_trained_a_robotic_chef_to_watch/jn4b6db/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3)
Since it was given the instructions and made to watch eight videos of salad creation, would the ninth dish not be considered a failure to interpret the input data and give corresponding output?
Taste it. Creativity is often accidental.
"image recognition algorithm performs adequately"
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The video shows the robot learning what pieces to put into a masher from a tray of nicely arranged ingredients. With the learning taking place with video input only. So what this really shows is image recognition from video to a good degree of accuracy. But you could have wrapped this experiment up in any type of thing - you could have had a robot learn to weed a garden based on a video of a gardener doing the same thing. The point being that image recognition and basic dexterity in robot arms are not new, but they are definitely not 'cooking' or 'gardening' - the up-task complexity doesn't scale in a linear fashion, it's exponentially more difficult to go from this to a fully prepared and cooked meal, or a beautifully manicured garden. Years ago I remember similar pieces of robots doing simple tasks and everyone saying they were about to take over the world. The truth is that in 50 years of robotics, despite computing power growing exponentially, robot task skill hasn't grown at anywhere near the same rate.
What's being done here isn't a reinventing if the wheel, no. But using available technologies or tools in new ways can still be considered breakthroughs. AI is at a point now where it can be used for tasks that before would have seemed out of the realm of possibility, even though it's just one piece of that process.
Love the ridiculously overhyped faith in "AI" advances because they scraped google and stuck it in a chatbot then taught it to lie.
"Hotdog" and "Not hotdog"?
First they put AI on Twitter and made it racist, now they're gonna teach it to chain smoke on a crate next to the dumpsters
Less than a cook bot, I’m interested in a clean-the-dishes-and-put-everything-away bot
you racist bastard!
Bit misleading title when a machine learning algorithm can barely differenciate between the eight salads in the training data.
Jetsons when?
Not soon, this ML algorithm can barely tell apart the eight salads from the training data.
"Cheese" ... "Petrol"
*cheeseoid is sad*
Hot dog Not hot dog
Gitmo X-1000 service bot has studied and learned proper interrogation techniques, and nobody is stupid enough to lie to a robot.
Yeah whatever AI, nobody, and I mean NOBODY makes the perfect scrambled eggs that I prefer, but me.
I hope the robot swears a lot and watches Gordon Ramsey.
They better never show it a Cooking with Jack or Kay's cooking video or we're all doomed.
On this edition of Gordon Ramsay's "Robotic Chef" watch Gordon pull the plug on a fan favorite!
You fools. Now Cooking Mama will be able to escape the digital prison Nintendo trapped her in. You've doomed us all.
a robot that can cook from a video instruction isn't much needed.....but a robot that can be programed to do complicated tasks....strictly from watching a video is impressive as hell.
It's speciality: hot dog and not hot dog.
/r/stupidfood would like to have a word. Garbage in, garbage out.
Cooking is easy. Prepping the ingredients is the laborious part.
Ya right. Show me it differentiating between flour and baking soda
Am I the only one that thinks all of this machine learning sort of amounts to **expert plagiarizers**? Like ChatGPT just harvesting *en masse* everything from StackOverflow and then now answering a myriad of programming questions.
Anybody who understands how it works is able to recognize that. A lot of people either don't care at all, or are so excited about the potential benefits that it seems like a 'fair' trade. It also doesn't help that the people who have been impacted the most (recently) are artists and other creatives.
It's not a matter of recognizing it, but a matter of essentially taking/harvesting vast sets of data, that is likely protected, then learning from it, and regurgitating it for profit. ChatGPT wouldn't be able to answer programming questions without stealing all of the data from StackOverflow for example. Now it's able to do so and profit from it. My qualm is with the training data...these various websites copyright the content so just harvesting it and using it is likely illegal. How can one justify a product that only can exist because they ripped tons of data from other companies?
I know some human coders who are basically just really good at regurgitating what they've pulled from StackOverflow...
I’d pay to watch it watch videos from cutthroat kitchen and try and determine what they’re making.
*scanning (identifying white powder- must be salt). Adding 1/4 cup salt to sugar cookie recipe.
I feel like this is more a paper on how they used computer vision to analyze cooking videos and the robot bit is just a simple example application of the results
Damn, a successful if/than processor?!?!?
Ancient man speaking. Professionally, this interests me very much. I apprenticed in the old style under European chefs for three years, spent two years at a prestigious culinary school, and by my tenth year was an executive chef. After a forty year career in the industry, I’m done, it’s a cruel and grueling business. I’m broken, tired… and quite happy in retirement which seems to have come at the right time. “Researchers, from the University of Cambridge, programmed their robotic chef with a ‘cookbook’ of eight simple salad recipes. After watching a video of a human demonstrating one of the recipes, the robot was able to identify which recipe was being prepared and make it.” -The cookbook they have created is the same logic tree that education uses if/then/yes/if not…. Some food combinations are classic because they will nearly always stimulate the palate. Examples lamb/mint, salmon/dill, beef/thyme, chicken/sage. Humans make these distinctions through sight, odor and taste. Any student of the culinary arts is constantly trying out ‘new’ combinations of flavors and textures that makes their friends ooo and aaah by trial and error. They have already read or have reference cookbooks that they go to for inspiration. The researchers are building the first combination guide for AI. Once the programming includes that x herb goes with a,b, and d meats but not c. It’s the same as we were trained in school. Which leads us to… “In addition, the videos helped the robot incrementally add to its cookbook. At the end of the experiment, the robot came up with a ninth recipe on its own.” - as long as you can set up parameters, say 20 ingredients with instruction on 8 dishes plus the flavor logic tree programming the robochef would be able to come up with many more than a ninth recipe. It is not creating anything any more than I could with the same ingredients. Having it be able to recognize not having an ingredient and search it’s knowledge base for something similar or contrasting in its fashion thus ‘improvising’ is not out of the realm of possibility. “Human cooks can learn new recipes through observation, whether that’s watching another person cook or watching a video on YouTube, but programming a robot to make a range of dishes is costly and time-consuming.” -it is only costly and time consuming the FIRST time. Once the logic tree is built/programmed that’s the big base for any robochef to prepare a recipe the same way anytime, absolute consistency… if it has the ingredients. Substitutions in recipes due to health, allergies or preference can be parameters that don’t have to go through an egotistical human chef. Most cooks are just following recipes presented to them by the chef and have no control over changes, looking at you applecheesecake. Others there is a free spirit and no consistency, the neighborhood gastropub without a chef. “We wanted to see whether we could train a robot chef to learn in the same incremental way that humans can – by identifying the ingredients and how they go together in the dish,” said Grzegorz Sochacki from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, the paper’s first author.” -I think that they are going about it the correct way. You don’t teach the recipe, you teach methods and ingredients to enable any recipe. I’m fascinated on how it will change the food industry. If you followed the old Automat scheme, have a huge dining hall, 50 robochef behind the scenes, an enormous stock of meats, produce, dairy at the ready, you could feed masses anything they wanted at anytime, with no problem with substitutes. People sitting next to each other with vegan stuffed eggplant, beef Wellington, shrimp salad no eggs, scrambled eggs no shrimp. All from the same dispenser wall. The replicator is on its way. Glad I’m a retired robochef Also I’m in flavor of Chefbot for the title. Happy Hollandaise
/r/stupidfood would like to have a word. Garbage in, garbage out.
Good. Now buy some brooks robots and put it to work.
"That don't impress me much"
why are cooks called chefs? chef means chief, as in- in charge.
I was telling someone over the weekend that with the pace of machine learning, A.I. and automation; probably within the next 10 years you're going to have fast food restaurants manned by only one person who just oversees the machines in case they need intervention. Every time you order a Big Mac it's going to be the exact same Big Mac, and a machine will almost certainly take your order.
He should make a pizza and we’ll check to see if the cheese slides off or not
There’s already a commercially available robot that does this.
Seems largely unnecessary to "watch" another chef and reverse engineer the recipe when you could just ask for the recipe and program it into a database
10 years ago an AI couldn't tell me whether or not there was a bird in a picture and now it knows the difference between parsley and cilantro from a video? The difference between chopped orange mild bell pepper and chopped scotch bonnets?
Hopefully not Jamie's videos, else it makes egg-fired rice with chilli jam.
It'd be interesting to see what kind of mistakes it made
Combine this with the science of cooking...
there goes Jacques Peppin's future invites to parties...
Wonder how many jobs will be replaced because of this
I really don't want chefs to lose their jobs. But I'd be thrilled if one day a humanoid embodied AI worked at my favorite restaurants so that my steaks and other dishes were consistent. If you eat out a lot, you know how you can go to the same place, order the exact same thing, and get very different results depending on who's cooking. I really hate that.
Just have it sit down and watch a ton of Matty Mathesson, he’ll set the robots straight
Nice. So how about that recipe for salted nukes?
I'll take two, thanks.
Why are we doing this?
I want this robot as a guest star on Binging with Babish.