A robot chef is able to recreate recipes by watching food videos.

Robots are a dab hand in the kitchen

Robots are a dab hand in the kitchen

The bot was programmed with a cookbook of eight basic salads featuring ingredients such as broccoli and carrots and could identify and make each dish that was being prepared after watching clips of humans doing the same thing.

The robot was also able to make an addition to the cookbook as it devised a ninth recipe on its own.

Experts say that the case shows that video content can be an important source of data for automated food production.

Researcher Grzegorz Sochacki, from the University of Cambridge, said: "We wanted to see whether we could train a robot chef to learn in the same incremental way that humans can - by identifying the ingredients and how they go together in the dish."

The boffin added: "It's amazing how much nuance the robot was able to detect."