A Perception-Manipulation Robotics System for Food Cutting

Abstract

In the development of cooking robots, mastering the task of cutting is crucial. A significant challenge lies in the diverse properties of food, which necessitate distinct cutting policies and even different knives for optimal processing. This paper presents a perception-manipulation framework for food-cutting tasks. Our system features a knife selection module that utilizes force data from a preliminary fixed trial cut to select the appropriate knife for the given food. This is followed by an adaptive cutting phase using reinforcement learning (RL) to balance cutting speed and energy efficiency. In our experiments, the knife selection module achieved 100% successful rate on unseen food, and we compared the performances of fixed policy, RL policy, with human operators. Our method not only achieves high performance but also demonstrates comparable results to those of human participants.