Towards realising an intelligent and energy efficient hob by employing a fuzzy logic based embedded agent approach

Among all domestic appliances populating our homes, it seems that hobs are not yet enabled with intelligent and energy efficient systems where people still use hobs in the same way their parents or grandparents did. This work aims to develop autonomous cooking systems which are able to provide a better cooking practice while increasing the energy efficiency of existing hobs. In this paper, we will present fuzzy logic based agents which could be embedded in normal hobs converting them to intelligent and more energy efficient ones. The realised system is able to self-regulate the heating during the most widely used cooking techniques including boiling, deep-frying, stir-frying, warming and melting. The agent is also capable of identifying when the user intervention is needed where the system continuously controls the cooking pot temperature preventing it from reaching unwanted values and detects when a pan boils-dry switching the appliance off immediately. We will present various real world experiments where it will be shown that the developed intelligent hob is capable of performing autonomous cooking to the satisfaction of the human user(s) while providing an energy saving of around 15-20% when compared to the human cooking practice. © 2013 IEEE.