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Cooki's the robot chef that only knows how to stir
When I try to picture what a live-in robot that makes fresh, hot meals would look like, a lone mechanical arm isn't exactly what springs to mind. That might be a slightly oversimplified description of Cooki, a prototype "robotic automated cooking" machine from up-start Sereneti Kitchen, but it's not far from the truth. In addition to its multidirectional arm, the sum of the device also includes a hotplate, and a mechanical tray arrangement for holding ingredients. The long and short of it is: You fill trays with a selection of fresh ingredients -- they correspond to a specific recipe, of course -- and choose the matching meal from within an app. A preprogrammed series of events then plays out, with the dish on the hotplate brought up to the correct temperature, ingredients added at the correct intervals and the arm, well, kind of pushing it all around until it's ready to serve.
Cooky robots will make soup for you, won't clean up afterwards
Cooking robots aren't exactly anything new (even if they haven't yet been perfected), but they generally come in the form of humanoid robots or, at the very least, robotic arms in order to be more adept in the kitchen. JST's ERATO research division has taken a decidedly different approach with these so-called Cooky robots, however, which are tiny, wheeled bots that scurry about your countertop and work as a team to make miso soup for you. As you might have guessed from the image above though, they aren't quite entirely autonomous, and require that you both label all the necessary ingredients with special cards, and pre-program things like cooking time and temperature. They'll take things over from there on out though and, as you can see in the video after the break, the results do at least appear to be edible.
