A Chinese cooking robot for elderly and disabled people

Abstract

Cooking themselves is very important and difficult for elderly and disabled people in daily life. This paper presents a cooking robot for those people who are confined to wheelchairs. The robot can automatically load ingredients, cook Chinese dishes, take cooked foods out, deliver dishes to the table, self-clean, collect used ingredient box components, and so on. Its structure and interface is designed based on the barrier-free design principles. Elderly and disabled people can only click one button in the friendly Graphic User Interface of a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) to launch the cooking processes, and several classic Chinese dishes would be placed in front of them one after another within few minutes. Experiments show that the robot can meet their special needs, and the involved aid activities are easy and effective for elderly and disabled people.