Tech hipsters, brace your digital souls. A robot barista could be whipping up your daily flat white at a Silicon Roundabout coffee shop in the near future.
A droid that can make 20 different drinks to order, including custom coffees, has been launched in South Korea by the country’s biggest phone network, SK Telecom.
The AI Barista Robot, which uses a robotic arm powered by “advanced artificial intelligence”, can even close your cup lid when serving beverages, according to its creators.
This firm wants to be the leader in coffee-making robots in the next five years as it looks to make “unmanned” cafes a reality, it said. The company’s partner on the new bot, fellow South Korean firm Dooson Robotics, already sells its robotic systems in Western Europe and North America.
Not content with creaming the latte-making duties into its repertoire, the barista robot can also be equipped with surveillance cameras to help out with security.
As its name implies, the new beverage-bot relies on artificial intelligence to complete tasks. Its computer brain can crunch mountains of data, according to SK Telecom, allowing it to help manage entire coffee store chains.
The machine can purportedly monitor the coffee-shop sales to help evaluate profits across multiple branches. It is said to identify popular menu items, raw material consumption and equipment status in real time. The bot then compiles and sends all this info to store owners through a mobile app – and it can supposedly do all of this analysis while crafting you a mean-looking macha latte.
Alongside automating the daily grind of running a coffee-shop businesses, SK Telecom believes robots can make life more convenient for customers.
Come to think of it, waking up to a robot-brewed coffee every morning doesn’t sound that bad – especially if the droid cleans up afterwards. The idea of a robot barista that never messes up your order, doesn’t idly chat to you during your morning commute, or try to flirt with you may also sound appealing. Though, the emergence of the machine will probably set off alarm bells for cafe workers.
But, this isn’t the only robotic coffee maker in town. A startup called Artly uses bot baristas that it claims can “make a perfect cup of coffee” using computer vision algorithms at several coffee store locations across the US West Coast, according to reports from last year. A similar droid is also serving coffee at train stations in Singapore, courtesy of a collaboration between local retail management and food and drinks companies.
Beyond hot brews, tech startups have also developed robotic arms to flip hamburgers at fast food joints, automated pizza-cooking stations, and sushi-making machines that can create nigiri, maki and omusubi (rice balls) on-demand. Feels like students will soon need to think a little harder to find their next holiday job.
