Abstract
This paper proposes a cooking amount estimation method for rice cookers based on Mahalanobis-Taguchi system. This estimation is important in that it can improve the cooking quality significantly. The proposed method enables us to estimate the amount in the early stage of cooking, thereby to give optimal heat in the whole process. To this end, an existing method adopts the minimal cooking quantity as a standard quantity and conduct estimation via outliers in terms of Mahalanobis distance, but this is easily affected by consumers' usage and nonlinearity peculiar to heat systems. Estimation precision is expected to be higher if the estimation is used by correlation of each characteristic data. The proposed method achieves this by adding sign to the estimation method for treating negative values in Mahalanobis distance, and verifies its effectiveness by experiments.
