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Intelligent Systems Lab Project: Intelligente Küchenlogistik

Participants

• Philip Kane
• Paul Lorenz
• Sabine Klein

Supervisors

• Holger Dierker

Motivation

• When users get hungry, they need to go check their pantry by themselves. Or they get unexpected visitors and want to know wether they've got chilled drinks available.
• In normal kitchen environments users need to gather all this informations on their own.
• An intelligent kitchen could help to solve this problem by offering the user a simple way to keep track of his food.

Application Szenario

On a sunny afternoon our user gets an unexpected visit from a friend with her young daughter. Of course our user wants to be a pleasant host and offers his visitors some drinks. His friend however, wants only chilled beer and her daughter also prefers her juice cold. Our user checks the GUI what kind of chilled drinks are available. After some conversation everyone gets a little hungry and still trying to be a good host, our user wants to cook something. Again he uses our GUI to show his visitors the available ingredients. Together they all decide what to cook, without even opening the fridge or any cupboard.

Objectives

The project goals are

• giving an overview over all stored ingredients
• notifications to the user about the expiration of some ingredients
• information about chilled drinks
• simple and stable User Interface

Description

Our system is build with the MVC paradigm in mind:

• The database is the model
• The GUI is the view
• Both are separated by the controller

The following figure shows the used architecture.

Results

We achieved a simple and stable User Interface for ingredient storing. We accomplished synergies with other projects in the intelligent kitchen. The implemented functionalities are:

• threading between the front- and backend
• highlighting of chilled drinks
• user notification of expired food
• easy shopping list creation
• online and offline information retrieval with EAN

Demonstration video:

Discussion and Conclusion

The planned goals have been achieved. There is a downside, the user will need more time to store his groceries in the pantry. However, since he doesn't have to check his pantry for food anymore, he actualy saves some time as well. Also he saves energy, since he doesn't has to open his fridge as often. It would be much more favourable to have a system, that doesn't require the user to check his groceries in or out. A possible solution would be, to use RFID. That however would require every kind of food to be equipped with a RFID tag. Also the use of a portable device, like a smartphone, would certainly be very useful. Checking the content of your fridge while shopping would be neat.

Outlook

Further work could be:

• storage and analyse of consumers behaviour
• food ordering over the internet
• smartphone app to support the functionality
• touchpad interface for user interaction
• usability evaluation