OnionBot: A System for Collaborative Computational Cooking
This work addresses the problem of shared kitchen automation for researchers and developers, but it is incremental as it focuses on assistance rather than full autonomy.
The paper tackles the challenge of human-robot collaboration in unstructured kitchen environments by proposing a system that uses computer vision to assist user-led cooking actions without robotic manipulation, resulting in a human-centered approach that generates image databases for future autonomous systems.
An unsolved challenge in cooking automation is designing for shared kitchen workspaces. In particular, robots struggle with dexterity in the unstructured and dynamic kitchen environment. We propose that human-machine collaboration can be achieved without robotic manipulation. We describe a novel system design using computer vision to inform intelligent cooking interventions. This human-centered approach does not require actuators and promotes dynamic, natural collaboration. We show that automation that assists user-led actions can offer meaningful cooking assistance and can generate the image databases needed for fully autonomous robotic systems of the future. We provide an open source implementation of our work and encourage the research community to build upon it.