Robot kitchen gears up for service

GUANGZHOU－Lin Chaodai, a 52-year-old chef, had never thought about teaching robots how to cook his award-winning Cantonese cuisine. Nor had he imagined that a robot could be "trained" to cook with the skill and flair of a master chef like himself.

However, in the past year Lin and 10 other chefs from Shunde, a city in Guangdong province known for its exquisite Cantonese delicacies, have been recruited to develop a menu and "teach" robots to cook for a new restaurant in downtown Guangzhou, the provincial capital.

To ensure delicious flavors, Cantonese cuisine relies on meticulous heat control and precise cooking times and portions of ingredients, Lin said. He and other chefs recorded the recipes down to the smallest detail, and fed the data into computers before engineers began their time-consuming adjustments and tests.