Students from MIT have developed a retrofuturistic kitchen robot that uses AI to look at the ingredients available and makes suggestions for what to cook based on your mood, skill level and available time.

Kitchen Cosmo currently exists as a functioning prototype with a bright-red body reminiscent of old-school appliances and a menagerie of different buttons, switches and sliders.

MIT students Jacob Payne and Ayah Mahmoud have developed Kitchen Cosmo

These allow home cooks to set their dietary preferences and mood, as well as the desired cooking time, difficulty level, number of portions and meal type.

Kitchen Cosmo then uses a webcam housed in its adjustable, anthropomorphic head to capture the available ingredients, which the internal AI identifies and turns into a recipe that ticks all these boxes.

A webcam in the robot’s head identifies ingredients

An integrated thermal printer spits out the final instructions, burnt onto unfurling paper receipts that can be torn off and stored in a clear tube at the bottom of the appliance.

The entire process is screen-free and was designed by MIT students Jacob Payne and Ayah Mahmoud to be as tactile and analogue as possible.

“As AI becomes more present in daily life, most interfaces lean toward efficiency and invisibility – touchscreens, apps or voice assistants,” Payne told Dezeen. “With Cosmo, we wanted to challenge that default and ask what a different kind of interaction could look like.”

“The goal wasn’t to make the interface seamless, but to make it tactile, playful and intentional. By designing a device that’s visible on the countertop and operated through dials and switches, Cosmo foregrounds the act of collaborating with AI instead of hiding it.”

Its retrofuturistic bright-red body nods to the 1969 Honeywell Kitchen Computer

Payne and Mahmoud 3D-printed their prototype from PLA and finished it with red paint and aluminium accents in a nod to the 1969 Honeywell Kitchen Computer – a flopped attempt at bringing computers into households before the invention of the PC.

But while the Honeywell spat out pre-programmed recipes, Kitchen Cosmo hopes to create a more creative, reciprocal relationship with the technology by letting users steer the final outcome via the machine’s many buttons.

The “most novel” of these, according to the MIT researchers, is the dial that allows home cooks to switch between six different moods based on whether they’re feeling nostalgic, experimental or scavenging the fridge for leftovers.

“These actions make the exchange with AI feel more personal and collaborative,” Payne explained. “Rather than being a purely transactional process, the moment of interaction helps reshape how people engage with smart technology in the kitchen.”

“Users set parameters not by typing or speaking but by turning knobs and flipping switches, each physical interaction reinforcing the sense that the device is being tuned, not commanded.”

The inputs from the manual buttons, as well as from the camera and the printer, are fed into an Arduino microcontroller housed within the device, which communicates with a central computer to handle the processing, generation, and output using OpenAI’s GPT-4o model.

AI-generated recipes are printed out like receipts

As a result, Kitchen Cosmo is liable to some of the same issues as OpenAI‘s own ChatGPT chatbot. For example, the generated recipes aren’t verified for taste, safety or procedural accuracy, and are mostly limited to western ingredients and techniques.

But future versions of the product could integrate a more knowledgeable, custom-built AI trained on curated recipe datasets, historical cookbooks, regional food archives and specific food knowledge such as ingredient pairing graphs or flavour compound networks.

The device exists as a functioning prototype

In the wake of the generative AI boom spawned by ChatGPT in 2023, many other designers and brands have also set their sights on figuring out how to integrate this technology into physical products.

Recent examples that explore real-life use cases include a Dream Recorder that lets users play back their dreams and the Petal camera, which produces mini nature documentaries based on footage of insects and birds in people’s backyards.

All photography courtesy of Jacob Payne and Ayah Mahmoud.

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