A Matter of Taste
Hot Ones - Robot Stays Cool While Eating Spicy Wings
I was inspired by Tessel's blog about taste and how that sense could be implemented in the design of artificial creatures such as robots. Taste is a very personal characteristic and the flavours that appeal to one person may not appeal to another person.
In my proposal, I thought it would be could for a robot to be able to participate in an episode of Hot Ones. Hot Ones is an online series where celebrities are interviewed while eating ten chicken wings that get increasingly hotter. A Scoville scale with different levels of spiciness is constantly referred to so that viewers and the participants can see how spicy the wings they are eating are.
Different celebrities have different tolerance to the heat level of the hot sauces and some get very uncomfortable and belligerent while others complete the task with ease.
It would be interesting to see if a robot could feel the pain or discomfot cause by tasting something that is too spicy. However, I am not sure if this would be possible. Alternatively, it would be nice for a robot to be able to report back on how spicy a meal you are cooking is. I imagine that it would provide a number on the Scoville scale that would communicate how spicy the dish is.
With the R2-D-Chew, they proposed that it would be able to measure salinity (the level of saltiness) in a dish. It would be great if they could measure other elements such as sweetness and, in the case of this blog, spiciness. It would be helpful to know how spicy the meal that is being prepared is and possibly even get information on the different results different chilli peppers could produce.
A further exploration could also look at how robots could personalise their measuring of spiciness to their owners. So that they could warn their owners if the food is too spicy for them since spice tolerance varies from person to person
