Newswise, August 2, 2016 — We’re all
accustomed to having appliances on our kitchen counters, from toasters and
blenders to coffee makers and microwaves.
If Mechanical Engineering Professor Hod Lipson has
his way, we’ll soon need to make room for one more—a 3D food printer that could
revolutionize the way we think about food and prepare it.
Over the past year, Lipson and his
students have been developing a 3D food printer that can fabricate edible items
through computer-guided software and the actual cooking of edible pastes, gels,
powders, and liquid ingredients—all in a prototype that looks like an elegant
coffee machine.
The printer is the result of a
design project devised by Lipson and his students, led by Drim Stokhuijzen, an
industrial design graduate student visiting from Delft University of Technology
in the Netherlands, and Jerson Mezquita, an undergraduate student visiting from
SUNY Maritime who is now a research associate in Lipson’s Creative Machines
Lab (CML).
VIDEO: https://youtu.be/VUvDCAG4P64
“Food printers are not meant to
replace conventional cooking—they won’t solve all of our nutritional needs, nor
cook everything we should eat,” says Lipson, a pioneering roboticist who works
in the areas of artificial intelligence and digital manufacturing atColumbia Engineering .
“But they will produce an infinite
variety of customized fresh, nutritional foods on demand, transforming digital
recipes and basic ingredients supplied in frozen cartridges into healthy dishes
that can supplement our daily intake. I think this is the missing link that
will bring the benefits of personalized data-driven health to our kitchen
tables—it’s the ‘killer app’ of 3D printing.”
Lipson’s team, who also includes PhD
student Joni Mici and undergrad Yadir Lakehal, has been working nonstop to get
the prototype up and running—the major challenge is getting the printer to
“cook” the food.
Lipson notes that, while he is sure
they can get the technology to work this summer, “stuffing it all into the new
machine, which is much more compact than the printer we’ve been using, is a big
challenge.”
The printer is fitted out with a
robotic arm that holds eight slots for frozen food cartridges; the students are
now working on incorporating an infrared heating element into the arm
.
Lipson, a member of Columbia’s Data Science Institute,
sees 3D printing as a universal technology that has the potential to
revolutionize lives by enabling us to design and manufacture things with
unprecedented freedom: “If we can leverage this technology to allow artificial
intelligence tools to design and create new things for us, we can achieve
immeasurable potential.”
Instrumental in advancing 3D printing
for more than 20 years, Lipson was one of the first researchers to work on
multi-material printing, first printing electromechanical systems and moving on
to bioprinting.
Printing biomaterials led him to
printing food, which he says is an especially exciting area: “It touches on
something that’s very basic to our lives. We’ve been cooking forever, but if
you think about it, while technology and software have wormed their way into
almost every aspect of our lives, cooking is still very, very primitive—we
still cook over an open flame, like our ancestors millennia ago. So this is one
area where software has not yet permeated. And when software touches something,
it takes off.”
Taking off to the kitchen, Lipson
and his team are collaborating with New York City-based International Culinary
Center (ICC), a top culinary school in the U.S.
Working closely with Chef Hervé
Malivert, ICC's director of food technology and culinary coordinator, Lipson
led several workshops to bring together ICC’s culinary creativity with the
CML’s technical knowledge to create new kinds of foods—novel textures,
combinations, and spatial arrangements of basic ingredients that chefs cannot
currently put together.
Malivert hoped to expose his students to the
future of food and new food technologies; Lipson’s aim was to explore and study
the potential of printed food, to create and document the student-designed
recipes, and unveil what food in 2025 might look like.
“The engineers have tackled how 3D
printing works, but now we turn to the kitchen experts to face the creative
question of what can be made,” says Lipson.
The workshops were a big success for
both the chefs and the engineers. “It was exciting to be able to design dishes
with the software, to see the drawing ahead of time, to see what’s going to
happen, to make interesting shapes and geometries,” says Malivert.
“This will help with planning, and
will be great to have at home. As these printers improve, it will be exciting
to see where we can go with these machines.
“For instance, I think they will be
very useful in the area of health and nutrition, especially in nursing homes
and hospitals.”
While working with the ICC, Lipson
also offered a new class this past spring on digital manufacturing at the
Engineering School. More than 32 students, mostly undergrads, took the pilot
course whose final project focused on food printing.
At the end of the semester, they
demonstrated unusual printed edible constructs. Cream cheese was a popular
choice as it was easy to extrude from the printer and blended nicely with other
ingredients. He plans to offer the class again next year.
Lipson and his team aim to have
their prototype printing much faster and more accurately by the end of the
year, and, they hope, cooking as it prints, too.
Unlike conventional oven cooking,
their 3D printer will be able to cook various ingredients at different
temperatures and different durations, all controlled by new software being
developed by Computer Science Professor Eitan Grinspun.
The software is critical, since the
3D printer they have been experimenting with is meant to design and print
machine parts, holes, screws, notches, cuts, and bends, not your next meal.
“This is the wrong language for
food,” explains Lipson.
“With food you want to layer, coat,
sprinkle, mix, so we need a new language so that we can describe what we want
to the printer. And it has to be easy for someone who’s not an engineer to
create a digital recipe.”
Grinspun, who directs the Columbia Computer
Graphics Group, is creating software that can predict what a 3D-printed
shape will look like after it has been cooked for a specific time at a set
temperature.
His team is developing a volumetric
material simulator that accounts for thermal transfer and the change of
material phase (the food’s viscoelastic properties) under heating/cooling
conditions, in effect, attempting to replicate oven-cooking food.
3D food printing offers
revolutionary new options for convenience and customization, from controlling
nutrition to managing dietary needs to saving energy and transport costs to
creating new and novel food items.
Lipson sees it as the “output
device” for data-driven nutrition and personal health, akin to precision
medicine, with huge potential for a profound impact.
Lipson is especially excited about
working with the ICC chefs and plans to continue the collaboration.
“We’ve already seen that putting our
technology into the hands of chefs has enabled them to create all kinds of
things that we’ve never seen before, that we’ve never tried. This is just a
glimpse of the future and what lies ahead.”
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