Robochef gets cooking

SOME people relish putting on an apron and cooking dinner. Others, though, find cookery a black art best delegated to a domestic helpmeet, a microwave oven or, failing either of those, the local home-delivery service. But Mark Oleynik, a Russian-born scientist and engineer now based in London, hopes to change this state of affairs by introducing a further option: a robot cook that is as good as a Cordon Bleu chef but which can be installed in an average house. A prototype of his idea, unveiled this week at an industrial fair in Hanover, Germany, has been demonstrating its culinary prowess in public, by whipping up an excellent crab bisque.Specialised cooking devices, such as Thermomix, made by Vorwerk, a German firm, do already exist. These, though, are essentially food-processors with bells and whistles. Dr Oleynik has taken a different approach. Instead of building a complex food-processor, he has set out to make his machine resemble a mini-kitchen, complete with conventional appliances and utensils. This can, in principle, be used to cook more or less anything. A pair of dexterous robotic hands, suspended from the ceiling, assemble the...Continue reading
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