Iron chefs may truly be made from metal if Moley Robotics brings its AI cook to the market in 2017 as planned. The idea is that you call in your order on a smartphone and the machine at home can make any of 2,000 recipes (though so far it’s only perfected one: crab bisque). Who knows if the company’s robot will be ready for the kitchen in two years and if the price can really initially be kept to a not-so-modest $15,000, but this is the general direction many restaurants (and perhaps homes) are headed. From Megan Gibson at Time:

Moley, which was founded by computer scientist Mark Oleynik, has partnered with the London-based Shadow Robot Company, which developed the kitchen’s hands. Twenty motors, two dozen joints and 129 sensors are used in order to mimic the movements of human hands. The robotic arms and hands are capable of grasping utensils, pots, dishes and various bottles of ingredients. Olyenik says that the robot hands are also capable of powering through cooking tasks quickly, though they’ve been designed to move quite slowly, so as not to alarm anyone watching it work.

Sadly for vegetarians, like Shadow Robot’s managing director Rich Walker, crab bisque is the only dish the robot is currently able to make. However, the company plans to build a digital library of 2,000 recipes before the kitchen is available to the wider public. Moley ambitiously aims to scale the robot chef for mass production and begin selling them as early as 2017. The robotic chef, complete with a purpose-built kitchen, including an oven, hob, dishwasher and sink, will cost £10,000 (around $15,000). Yet that price point will depend on a relatively high demand for the kitchen and it’s still unclear how large the market is for such a product at the moment.•

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“It has created what it claims is the first robot chef.”

The kitchen of the future as presented by Walter Cronkite in 1967.