University of Cambridge researchers have managed to train a robot to taste the saltiness of food as it cooks. They first taught the robot to imitate the human process of chewing and tasting before it carried out the taste test on 9 varieties of scrambled eggs and tomatoes. This happened during three different stages of chewing, and it produced multiple visual ‘taste maps’ of the dish as it cooked.
Researchers equipped the robot with a conductance probe, which served as a salinity sensor, to imitate the human sense of taste. As it prepared the meal, the number of tomatoes and level of salt were altered before using the probe to ‘taste’ the dish throughout. Now imitating the change in texture caused by chewing required the egg to be put into a blender and then ‘tasted’ again by the robot with the probe.
Most home cooks will be familiar with the concept of tasting as you go – checking a dish throughout the cooking process to check whether the balance of flavors is right. If robots are to be used for certain aspects of food preparation, it’s important that they are able to ‘taste’ what they’re cooking,” said Grzegorz Sochacki from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering.
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