A Futuristic Kitchen Assistant – Powered by Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

My project is about building a prototype of a futuristic kitchen assistant that is powered by Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. Using Cozmo (an AI-powered robot made by Anki) and Calypso (a language developed by Professor David Touretzky at Carnegie Mellon University for programming intelligent robots), I have built a proof-of-concept futuristic kitchen assistant that shows how the food identification and serving process can be automated. I accomplished this by learning Calypso’s rule-based language and its five fundamental laws of computation. Using Calypso’s various programming features such as perception, teleoperation, pursue and consume, conflict resolution, speech and hearing, landmark-based navigation, and path planning, I learned how to make Cozmo move around and do intelligent activities, which are demonstrated in my prototype. I designed a model kitchen using a cardboard box. I used the wall templates that had special symbols called “ArUco markers” to help Cozmo recognize kitchen walls and door openings and plan his path accordingly. Once I had the physical model of the kitchen ready, I created a new Calypso program that simulated the model kitchen along with the walls, door openings, the Cozmo robot, and three cubes that represented three different types of food. The program enabled Cozmo to recognize my voice instructions to get a particular food, go to the kitchen through the door opening, pick up the cube that represented the correct food, bring it to the dining room, and then drop it on a plate in front of me. I faced several challenges such as how to make Cozmo recognize my voice, identify the door openings correctly, and move around without hitting obstacles. Eventually, after a lot of testing and debugging, I was able to get the kitchen assistant working and was able to prove that using a robot programming language such as Calypso, a robot can be programmed to perform highly complicated tasks such as listening to voice commands from human beings, navigate from one room to another (i.e., from the dining room to the kitchen), pick up an object (i.e., food), and then navigate and bring the object to another room (i.e., from the kitchen back to the dining room). In the future, I plan to add more intelligence to the kitchen assistant such as providing the ability for a person to select a dish/recipe on a smartphone app, making the kitchen assistant go to the kitchen, find the right ingredients, follow the instructions in the recipe, make the food, and then serve it to the person.