It can take Japanese chefs years to master how to make sushi, which is considered an art form as well as a nutritious meal.
But now there’s a robot that can create a perfect plate of sushi, adding fish and wasabi to sticky rice, before presenting it professionally on a board in next to no time.
The robotic chef, created by Kawasaki – the world’s largest manufacturer of automation robots – uses its arms to manipulate the food and is the latest in a line of mechanical foodies, including a pancake-flipping android and biscuit-dunking machine.
Kawasaki adapted a double-arm Scara robot to make the unnamed sushi bot, which was put through its paces at its Kawasaki Robo stage showroom in Tokyo.
The showroom aims to show the creativity behind the company’s machines, as well as their technical capabilities, PC Watch reported.
The robot is able to hold different sushi utensils and appears to use a small vacuum attachment to pick up a piece of fish and egg, and place them neatly on top of balls of sticky rice, according to pre-programmed instructions.
A video showcasing the robot in action then shows it adding a squirt of hot wasabi sauce before placing the finished sushi on a wooden serving board.
However, the robot does not prepare the fish or rice itself and still relies on some human input.
And while it may replace homogenised sushi, the robot will not pose a threat to artisans who can prepare sushi exactly to a diner’s wishes – and pour them a glass of sake too.
The machine can make pizza, by squeezing tomato sauce onto the base, before adding toppings and placing it in an oven.
However, it is not the first robot to be able to make pizza.
Researchers at a European project named RoboHow demonstrated its robotic chef could make pizza and flip pancakes in 2015.
The machine, called PR2, was programmed to follow instructions to flip a pancake with a spatula - an action that while simple for humans is though for robots, as well as craft a pizza.
The sushi robot is the next installment in a growing field of robots involved in the creation and preparation of food.
WIRED recently joined with Sarah Barnes from the Institute of Physics to test 10 biscuits for ‘dunkability’ using a robolink D robot arm by igus.
Read more: What's the best biscuit for dunking? We use robots and physics to settle the debate
The robot arm ensured no external forces skewed the results and we timed how long it took for each biscuit to lose physical integrity while dunked halfway into a mug of tea.
Digital scales were used to measure how much liquid each biscuit could absorb after a 15-second dunk. Each test was conducted three times, and an average time was calculated.
The experiment found the most danceable biscuit to be McVitie’s Rich Tea, which held its form with ease for more than 10 minutes after being dunked. McVitie’s Digestives came in second and Fox’s Party Rings in third place.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
