Closed-Loop Robotic Cooking of Scrambled Eggs with a Salinity-based ‘Taste’ Sensor

Abstract

The sense of taste is fundamental to a human chef’s ability to cook tasty food. To develop robots that can demonstrate human-like cooking, robots need to be equipped with a sense of taste and enabled to use this perception capability to improve or understand the food which they are cooking. We propose a first study of using a salinity sensor to provide a robot with a sense of saltiness. We then demonstrate how this artificial taste receptor can be used to create an autonomous closed-loop cooking system that uses a measurement of saltiness to improve the cooking process of preparing scrambled eggs. Specifically, we show that the sensor measurements can be mapped to different taste metrics such as the overall saltiness and state of mixing the eggs, and how the cooking process can be adapted to match a human-cooked dish, hence individual preferences.