抄録
Food materials and products have various chemical and physical characteristics and changes and their individual differences and characteristics are large. Therefore, analysis, evaluation, and manipulation of food products are often more difficult than for industrial products. In recent years, with the innovative progress of AI, Big Data, and robotics and mechatronics, recognition and adaptation capabilities for unknown, multiple, ununiform and complex objects have been drastically improving. Research and developments in food engineering effectively utilizing such advanced technologies are conducted, and referred to as ‘new food engineering.’ A Cabinet Office is now leading large-scale projects to cope with food production and consumption problems by employing systems highly integrating cyber space and physical space. Such large-scale projects are on a cutting edge frontier where enterprising researchers develop new food engineering technology. The new food engineering can be regarded as research and development in which machines instead of humans make and eat food to contribute to design, development, and production of foods. Therefore, actual research and development tasks are classified into two groups: ‘making’ and ‘eating.’ Finally, it should be noted that true growth of new food engineering is achieved through experiences where food science researchers and engineering researchers work together, and share failures and successes.
