Robotics meets the culinary arts

While the idea of creating robots that can be eaten or food that behaves like robots may seem weird, it is a real challenge for the scientific community. As part of the EU-funded RoboFood project, researchers from EPFL and the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT- Italian Institute of Technology) have collaborated with pastry chefs and food scientists from EHL in Lausanne, to marry robotic science and gastronomy. Their project, RoboCake, is being showcased at the Expo 2025 Osaka. “Robotics and food are two separate worlds,” says Dario Floreano, head of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS) at EPFL and coordinator of the RoboFood project. “However, merging them offers many advantages, particularly in terms of limiting electronic waste and food waste.” Other applications in the fields of emergency nutrition and health are being considered by scientists. “Edible robots could be used to deliver food to endangered areas, to deliver medicines in innovative ways to people who have diff ... Read full article.