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Chefs frequently rely on their taste to assess the content and flavor of dishes during cooking. While tasting the food, the mastication process also provides continuous feedback by exposing the taste receptors to food at various stages of chewing. Since different ingredients of the dish undergo specific changes during chewing, the mastication helps to understand the food content. The current methods of electronic tasting, on the contrary, always use a single taste snapshot of a homogenized sample. We propose a robotic setup that uses the mixing to imitate mastication and tastes the dish at two different mastication phases. Each tasting is done using a conductance probe measuring conductance at multiple, spatially distributed points. This data is used to classify 9 varieties of scrambled eggs with tomatoes. We test four different tasting methods and analyze the resulting classification performance, showing a significant improvement over tasting homogenized samples. The experimental results show that tasting at two states of mechanical processing of the food increased classification F1 score to 0.93 in comparison to the traditional tasting of a homogenized sample resulting in F1 score of 0.55. We attribute this performance increase to the fact that different dishes are affected differently by the mixing process, and have different spatial distributions of the salinity. It helps the robot to distinguish between dishes of the same average salinity, but different content of ingredients. This work demonstrates that mastication plays an important role in robotic tasting and implementing it can improve the tasting ability of robotic chefs.

Robotic chefs are a promising technology that can bring sizeable health and economic benefits when deployed ubiquitously. This deployment is hindered by the costly process of programming the robots to cook specific dishes while humans learn from observation or freely available videos. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that incrementally adds recipes to the robot's cookbook based on the visual observation of a human chef, enabling the easier and cheaper deployment of robotic chefs. A new recipe is added only if the current observation is substantially different than all recipes in the cookbook, which is decided by computing the similarity between the vectorizations of these two. The algorithm correctly recognizes known recipes in 93% of the demonstrations and successfully learned new recipes when shown, using off-the-shelf neural networks for computer vision. We show that videos and demonstrations are viable sources of data for robotic chef programming when extended to massive publicly available data sources like YouTube. INDEX TERMSComputer vision, hidden Markov model, learning by demonstration, robotic chef, salad chef.

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