Development of robotic kitchen counter: kitchen counter equipped with sensors and actuator for action-adapted and personally fit assistance

This paper proposes robotic kitchen counter, a novel kitchen counter with sensors to monitor a user´s action and with the capability of changing its top plate height according to his preference. The robotic kitchen counter was realized by installing various kinds of sensors to the commercial kitchen counter and by putting a jack mechanism underneath. The sensor data acquisition and the top plate height setting can be done through network. Cooking experiments with this robotic kitchen counter showed that 1) there´s an optimal kitchen counter height according to an individual person and to his action during cooking behavior, and that 2) the dynamic reappearance of the kitchen counter height he manually adjusted in the stages during the previous cooking behavior was recognized handful, which is the typical example of the simplest action-adapted and personally-fit assistance. The outstanding point of this robotic kitchen counter is that it can measure the cooking action without disturbing the cooking behavior itself while providing action-adapted and personally fit assistance based on the data obtained. The authors believe that the hardware and software techniques obtained through this development can be the starting point to develop other action-adapted and personally fit assistance system.