Cooking themselves is very important and difficult for elderly and disabled people in daily life. This paper presents a cooking robot for those people who are confined to wheelchairs. The robot can automatically load ingredients, cook Chinese dishes, take cooked foods out, deliver dishes to the table, self-clean, collect used ingredient box components, and so on. Its structure and interface is designed based on the barrier-free design principles. Elderly and disabled people can only click one button in the friendly Graphic User Interface of a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) to launch the cooking processes, and several classic Chinese dishes would be placed in front of them one after another within few minutes. Experiments show that the robot can meet their special needs, and the involved aid activities are easy and effective for elderly and disabled people.

Up to now, most people are still cooking in the kitchen, which makes them feel fatigued and also makes the air polluted. With the development of the numerical control technology, it becomes more and more urgent to apply the related technology to the automatic cooking field. In this paper, the cooking technique for the Chinese dishes is introduced and China's first cooking robot, named AI Cooking Robot (AIC), is presented. The robot mainly consists of four parts: the wok mechanism, the stirring-fry and dispersing mechanism, the feeding mechanism, and the mechanism of leaving the material in the middle process. In order to adjust the temperature, the fire control system is also given in this paper. Experiments show that the new robot will be a milestone in the cooking automation science because of its cooking technique.