A robot "waitress" delivers food to customers at a restaurant in Fuzhou, Fujian province. [Photo provided to China Daily]

On Dec 12, the Xidan Mingzhu Market in Beijing announced that it was forced to shorten operating hours because of a shortage of staff.

To seize upon the business opportunity, various domestic robot manufacturers, including Siasun, Uditech and Keenon, have become increasingly more engaged in research and development in the area of service robotics in recent years.

Across the world, robot "chefs "are set to take over cooking in restaurants and technology advances are taking them a step further.

Working in collaboration with domestic appliances manufacturer Beko, researchers from the University of Cambridge have trained their robot "chef" to assess the saltiness of a dish at different stages of the chewing process, imitating a similar process in humans, according to their research published in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI.

Their results could be useful in the development of automated or semiautomated food preparation by helping robots to learn what tastes good and what doesn't, making them better "cooks".

"Most home cooks will be familiar with the concept of tasting as you go — tasting a dish throughout the cooking process to check whether the balance of flavors is right," Grzegorz Sochacki from Cambridge's Department of Engineering, the paper's first author, told Frontiers in Robotics and AI. "If robots are to be used for certain aspects of food preparation, it's important that they are able to 'taste' what they're cooking."