Thailand Is Building A Taster Bot To Ensure High Quality Cuisine That Tastes Right
Cartoons taught us that robots mainly like to feast on oil, but then again, they also imparted other erroneous lessons, such coyotes being able to survive repeated falls off of cliffs -- beep, beep! Go ahead and color us intrigued, because it turns out robots have a taste for real human food. Or at least some do, such as the one developed in Thailand by Sirapat Pratontep, an expert in nanotechnology.
A government-financed organization called the Thai Delicious Committee (yes, seriously) oversaw the development of the taster bot, or as it's more accurately described, an "intelligent robot that measures smell and taste in food ingredients through sensor technology in order to measure taste like a food critic," according to a report in The New York Times. Why bother with such a project?
Apparently once you venture out of Thailand, finding good Thai food is a bear. Thai restaurants have a tendency to be bland, which is something that so perturbed Thailand's prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, that she brought it up during a cabinet meeting. Though her political party has since been thrown out of office in a military coup, the mission to separate good Thai food from bad is in full swing -- the government will introduce the robot tonight at a dinner party in a Bangkok hotel.
The taster bot is this beige, boxy thing that looks like a 3D printer more than anything else. You place food samples inside and it uses its sensors and computing power to scan for a chemical signature. Those are then compared against a standard that's considered authentic.
Out in the real world, restaurants that use officially sanctioned recipes can plop a Thai Delicious logo on their menus, though it's not clear if this is something that will be pushed beyond the boundaries of Thailand.
A government-financed organization called the Thai Delicious Committee (yes, seriously) oversaw the development of the taster bot, or as it's more accurately described, an "intelligent robot that measures smell and taste in food ingredients through sensor technology in order to measure taste like a food critic," according to a report in The New York Times. Why bother with such a project?
Apparently once you venture out of Thailand, finding good Thai food is a bear. Thai restaurants have a tendency to be bland, which is something that so perturbed Thailand's prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, that she brought it up during a cabinet meeting. Though her political party has since been thrown out of office in a military coup, the mission to separate good Thai food from bad is in full swing -- the government will introduce the robot tonight at a dinner party in a Bangkok hotel.
The taster bot is this beige, boxy thing that looks like a 3D printer more than anything else. You place food samples inside and it uses its sensors and computing power to scan for a chemical signature. Those are then compared against a standard that's considered authentic.
Out in the real world, restaurants that use officially sanctioned recipes can plop a Thai Delicious logo on their menus, though it's not clear if this is something that will be pushed beyond the boundaries of Thailand.
