Robotics could be the newest help in the heart of the home
ARMAR, the latest in technologically advanced robots made to take care of household chores
and work in the kitchen.
By Kenneth Lewis, Staff Writer
Remember all those times you had to clean up the dishes, or get the ketchup from the refrigerator, and you wished someone or something would do it for you? These days, your wish may not be far from reality. With the new developments in the robotic industry, engineers are looking at the prospect of robot personal chefs.
Though machines have been programmed to mass produce and package food, today there are more projects researching into robots’ ability to customize and personalize food order by order. Currently some kitchens are using robots for menial tasks such as noodle slicing and robotic as wait staff, but these are more gimmicks than actual innovation. Students part of a design team in Poland were recently featured in a CNN article displaying their work on converting a robot traditionally made to work in car factories to cook food as a chef.
“Our project is called ‘Let’s Cook the Future’ and we try to cook with robots — we had a robot that initially was made just to be in factories and make cars and we tried to treat it as a human and put it in the kitchen,” stated Barbara Dzaman, a student working on this design team.
However, it is not simply graduate students who are looking at this prospect. Design Director for Electrolux, Thomas Johansson has been exploring this concept of robots in the kitchen for years, especially with the new development of 3-D printing. The company Electrolux, a Swedish household and professional appliance manufacturer, recently announced semi-finalists for new research projects including 3-D food printers and kitchen appliances that can tell you the exact nutritional data of the food you are making and what possible toxins it contains before you make it.
The new robotic chef, for instance, can “print” cookies layer by layer. Cookie cutters are no longer a necessity.
Even though having fully automated robots cooking full meals in the average kitchen seems far off, researchers said that appliances today including self-cleaning ovens, microwaves that adjust to the food in them and refrigerators that scan use-by dates bring us closer to this reality. The real question is—how non-human do we want to make the heart of the home?
