Texture Evaluation System of Paste Food Based on Cohesiveness Embossing Effect by Elastic Imitation Tongue

This paper presents the paste object sensing by using the elastic material. Employing the elastic imitation tongue as the interface of the compression test device, the tongue is passively deformed and holds the paste food. In this case, the holding state varies with respect to the material of the paste food, and its cohesiveness is embossed. Based on this effect, the method for quantifying the cohesiveness of the paste food by the pressure distribution measurement is proposed. Then, the texture evaluation method, where the value of the sensory evaluation is estimated from the feature value of the pressure distribution, is developed. Finally, the validity of the proposed method is confirmed by experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed method succeeds in estimating the values of sensory evaluation of five kinds of paste food with the coefficient of determination of 0.9.