This Cooking Robot Can Prepare an Entire Meal

This isn’t the future we were promised; instead of robots handling all of our manual labor, we have AI putting artists out of work. But in many cases, this isn’t a problem with technology — it is a problem of practicality. There is a reason that we have robots to clean our clothes (washing machines), but not robots to dust our ceiling fans. The latter is certainly possible on a technical level, it would just be a wildly expensive solution to a minor inconvenience. Cooking, however, is something most people have to do every day. So, Fungineering built the robot chef that world has been eagerly awaiting.

If you wanted a robot that could do everything a human chef could, you’d really need to just get a humanoid model and those are still very expensive. But if you narrow all of food down to just certain kinds of meals prepared in specific ways, the challenge becomes much more approachable. For that reason, Fungineering chose to use what we’ll call the “big ol’ pot of ingredients” cooking technique.

Funginerring was inspired by those large rotating cooking pots that are often used to make huge amounts of food like stir fry. His reasoning was that, to prepare such a meal, one only needs to drop in the ingredients at the proper times and keep everything moving so it doesn’t burn. Instead of actually rotating a pot, his robot uses a regular pot on a hot plate and just stirs.

To pull that off, Fungineering needed to overcome two major challenges: adding ingredients and stirring. Adding the ingredients was, surprisingly, the more straightforward of the two. For spices, he used a rotating dispenser with servo-operated openings. The larger ingredients, such as rice and meat, go in stainless steel containers arranged around the cooking pot. At the set times, big servo motors flip those containers, flinging the contents into the pot.

It seems like overkill, but Fungineering built a small robot arm to do the stirring. A Raspberry Pi controls that and Fungineering can program the motions by physically moving the arm the first time. Then the robot arm can repeat those motions when desired. It mostly just stirs, but it can also do a bit of scraping and shoving when necessary.

We’ve glossed over a lot of the issues Fungineering ran into, like the tendency of the spices to stick in their containers instead of dispensing. But the final result is pretty darn impressive, with the robot successful making dhal from only raw ingredients—though it did require a tiny bit of human assistance.