Robots learn to cook from YouTube
But it can't cook an entire recipe. Yet.
Robots are learning to pour and mix ingredients and flip burgers by watching cooking videos on YouTube.
A research team from National ICT Australia and the University of Maryland in the US is giving robots an ability to learn any movement sequence and repeat it. Using video is the first step.
Yi Li, who is leading the project in Australia, says a robot has learned movements and identified objects such as a mixing bowl or spatula by analysing pixels in the video downloaded to it. It then repeats the behaviour.
So far the cooking robot has “watched” 88 videos and learned how to pick up and turn around objects in the kitchen, pour, mix and flip a flat object like a burger.
But it can’t yet execute an entire recipe, Dr Li says. For example, the robot’s hand is yet to be capable of cutting objects. But it is early days.
In future, the robot might be taught to clean rooms, pack things up, clean up your desk and do the housework.
“Housework would be our main focus at the moment. Actually housework is more complicated than you think,” Dr Li says.
“Usually researchers try to replicate what the people are doing in the video. They didn’t try to understand the goal of an action. If we can understand some high-level purpose, we can have different implementations, different variations,” Dr Li said.
He said everything in a household had a purpose.
“You want to cook [a steak] to medium-rare, that’s a purpose.”
Dr Li said he and his colleagues at the University of Maryland had the idea of developing a deep-learning robot before he joined NICTA four years ago.
Initially he was involved in NICTA’s bionic eye project, which also involved analysing pixels to detect objects and movement.
The robot research was presented last month in Austin, Texas, at the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
NBR Food Industry Week
Thu, 05 Feb 2015
Thu, 05 Feb 2015
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Robots learn to cook from YouTube
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