Abstract
In recent years, our homes have been equipped with smarter and more energy-efficient electric appliances, such as smart fridges, washing machines, TVs, etc. However, it seems that cookers seem to have been left aside during this trend although, for example, in U.K., electric cookers consume up to 20% of the evening peak electricity consumption. In addition, over half of the accidental house fires are due to cooking and cooking appliances. One of the reasons for the lack of smart energy-efficient electric cookers is the complexity of performing energy-efficient control for the various cooking techniques. This paper presents a fuzzy logic-based system, which can be cheaply retrofitted in existing electric cookers to convert them to semiautonomous, energy efficient, and safe smart electric cookers. The proposed system can control the cooker heating plate to allow the semiautonomous safe operation of the most common cooking techniques including boiling, stir/shallow-frying, deep-frying, and warming. In addition, the developed system can identify when human intervention is necessary and when dangerous situations happen or are imminent. We will present several real-world experiments, which were performed in the University of Essex intelligent apartment (iSpace) with various users where the proposed system operated a cooker semiautonomously in various cooking modes, and it was shown that when compared with the human manual operation, the proposed system realized an average energy saving of 21.42%, 34.43%, and 20.29% for the boiling, stir/shallow-frying, and deep-frying cooking techniques, respectively. In addition, the realized smart cooker has shown unique safety features not present in the existing commercial cookers.