Robot Chef is a prototype chef that is capable of producing meals from a collection of over 2,000 recipes. It can be used by individuals with limited upper extremity and lower extremity strength, coordination and endurance associated with arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, stroke or spinal cord injury. Robot Chef uses natural motions learned from Tim Anderson, a human chef and winner of the BBC's MasterChef competition in 2011. The hands are produced by Shadow Robot Company. Eventually, home chefs will be able to use a motion capture system to "teach" the robot new recipes, or download them from an iTunes-like service.
Rather than cooking like a machine, the system works by first recording human actions in 3D and then converting these into highly precise movements. The prototype was trained by chef Tim Anderson, who spent time whipping up original dishes in a motion-capture studio.
According to Moley’s website, the firm hopes to bring a consumer version to market by 2017 that will feature several additions, including a library of thousands of recipes, a dishwasher and a refrigerator. Users will even be able to control it remotely using an app, which would allow you to order your dish to be ready for when you get home.
Eventually, Moley hopes to produce a version complete with cameras so that users can teach it to create their own dishes, which can then be uploaded to a digital recipe library and shared with other people. They also want later models to be capable of dealing with tricky things like stopping mixing at the appropriate time to prevent splitting or over-beating.