Manipulation for Food Bolus Formation

Abstract

This paper proposes a robotic manipulation method to reproduce the process of human’s food bolus formation. Decomposing and simplifying complicated mastication behavior of human, we define three primitives for robot manipulation: crushing, mixing, and gathering. We design the structure and motion of robot to execute the primitives, and develop a prototype. Executing these primitives sequentially, we try to reproduce the process of human food bolus formation. In experiment, human and robot masticate food samples and their food bolus images are acquired. By analyzing the images with convolutional neural network, we evaluate whether the robot can reproduce the human’s food bolus formation.