A robot to feed you

A white board lists about 30 dishes. Potato fry, vegetable sambar, cabbage playa, moong dal tadka, aloo baigan masala, matar paneer, upma, bisibelebath among others. That could be a common sight in any Indian restaurant except that here, in a sleepy Bangalore colony, it is a robot that is cooking them.

Developed by a computer science engineer, Cohan Sujay Carlos, and an aerospace engineer Arpit Sharma, the 'Mechanical Chef' is currently a prototype that successfully mimics the operations of a human cook, right from releasing the ingredients in a phase wise manner to stirring the dish as it cooks.

This writer made a visit recently and the robo chef made him a green bell pepper fry and white rice. The fry turned out to be just perfect, and delicious. The chef, however, messed up the rice a bit - may be it required more water or less cooking time. The machine will learn that the next time it attempts.    

Here's how the robot operates:

1. The two engineers studied Indian cooking and broke up a cook's operations into three major parts - adding ingredients, water, spices; heating; stirring. The robot was built on this philosophy.

2. The circular machine has inlets at the top in two layers to drop ingredients onto the pan below. The outer circumference of the robot holds dry spices. Once filled, spices last for 50 cycles of cooking. There is a water container and one for oil. The inner circumference of the machine has inlets for stuff such as vegetables and rice. Vegetables need to be chopped before being fed to the robo. For the green bell pepper fry, the machine was fed with tomatoes and onion, besides the pepper.

3. The recipes are fed in an app. The robo is an IoT device connected to Wi-Fi. Of course, algorithms dictate how the robo functions, and what ingredients are released when, the temperature of the cooking. Mechanical Chef currently has three induction stoves attached to cook three dishes simultaneously. Once the command button is pushed, the robo releases the oil to a pan, heats it up, releases the onion, tomatoes, the pepper, the spices, salt, and stirs it.

4. What problem does the device solve? The founders say that every household spends one-two hours in the kitchen. Everyday cooking can be mundane and the robot can save them time for better things. Second, the robot can replace your cook. Like any other machine, it wouldn't tire or take holidays. Neither would it be inconsistent.

5. What's next: Mechanical chef is currently trailing a more compact machine that looks less intimidating, besides saving space.

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