We live in an era of ‘chefs’ and ‘chauffeurs’ for every need—one to cook up the favorite delicacy, the other one to get to our favorite destination. Technology has made everything more flexible and relaxing. Have you ever wondered about an era where robots and machinery would cook and serve the dishes to you according to your choice?.
With this pace of development in the technical field, thinking about the same wouldn’t be ambitious. As a result, engineers from Columbia University have been working on the same. They have also come up with some outstanding and remarkable achievements, and we might call it the Robot Chef.
What is a Robot Chef ?
This team of engineers has achieved this using lasers for cooking and 3D printing technology for assembling foods. It sounds artificial, doesn’t it?. But the results are impressive; this personal chef can cook whatever you want with the shape, texture, and flavor of your choice.
Under the supervision of Hod Lipson, Mechanical Engineering Professor, Columbia University, the team from the creative machines lab has been working on a fully autonomous digital personal chef. Since 2007, the team has developed 3D-printed foods and attracted many other companies by introducing multi-ingredient prints to the existing studies.
The observations from the team stated that the printers are capable of producing ingredients to a millimeter precision without heating. Now further moving forward, the team is also analyzing ways to induce nutritious value, flavor, and texture in the next stage with the help of lasers.
The Next Stage of Development
As part of the research in the early stages, the team explored various types of cooking processes with blue light and infrared light exposures. By initializing cooking depth, color, moisture, and flavor parameters, the team concluded that the laser-cooked food shrinks 50 percent less, retains double the moisture content, and shows a similar deployment.
Now, to proceed with the studies ahead, the team led by Lipson is excited and understands the need to develop a fully sustainable ecosystem to support it. Computer-Aided Design of food samples is needed as well as a high-level software that can process it is also a requirement. Once this is done, the team also aims for a digital directory to include all the recipes or an interactive platform to share the recipes.
Jonathan Blutinger, a Ph.D. in Lipson’s lab, says, “Food is something that we all interact with and personalize daily—it seems only natural to infuse software into our cooking to make meal creation more customizable.”
Food is not strange to anybody. Optimistically, it is something that can even end many fights and wars. Using lasers, light, and other technical measures to cook food cooked through a consistent methodology may seem suspicious as well as unreliable. Any research, including such a crucial area of humanity, must be dealt with seriously and ensured no harm.
What do you think about the robot chef? Please share with us in the comment section below.
Source: Columbia University
