Students Create Cooking Robot that Makes 600 Chinese Dishes

A robot invented by college students and a business in China can cook 600 Chinese dishes to order.

By Kathryn Hawkins. Posted on April 14 2010

Wikimedia Commons image by Tamorlan.

Feel like an order of Mu Shu Pork? How about some General Tso’s Chicken?

Rather than calling up your local Chinese take-out joint and driving out to pick it up, wouldn’t it be cool if you could just ask your robot to whip the dishes up for you?

Thanks to a new collaboration between Yangzhou University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and a business in Shenzhen, China, an innovative new cooking robot can do exactly that, says PopSci. The robot really knows its way around a wok: it’s capable of cooking 600 classic Chinese dishes, with no human intervention once the ingredients have been prepped.

There’s no demo video available of the latest model, but you can check out an earlier version from 2009 whipping up a batch of Kung Pao Chicken in this video.

To be honest, we’re betting you probably don’t have the room for this digital chef in your kitchen (or the yen in your bank account)—we just thought it was a cool concept. However, if you’d rather go old-school and actually learn to cook these dishes on your own, Martin Yan has much to teach you.

Filed under: Science, Weird,

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