News

Coffee service gets a robotic boost at Illinois university

April 15, 2019

Coffee is being doled out by a robotic arm at the engineering quad of the University of Illinois.

Called the Yummy Future Robot Café, the robotic design features a wheeled white cube housing espresso machinery, according to a report at Daily Illini, the university's student newspaper.

Coffee lovers stride up a short ramp, choose and pay and then can watch the robotic arm carry a cup, fill it with espresso and deliver it to the customer.

It was co-created by grad student Guangzhe Cui who told the student paper the robot café delivers on his view on the role of humans in business in the future.

"For those routine works, we don't want the future to be a group of humans just coming to the machine and being fed on the machine, but we want the humans to own the machines and find out ways to make the machines work for them," Cui told the student paper. 

The robotic cafe cost around $25,000 and is selling about 100 to 200 cups a day, according to Cui.

In the future the creators hope to add mobile pre-orders, a delivery system, dietary adjustments and life like customer service, Cui said.

"When people are seeing it mix things for them, they feel like they are being served. That feeling is that it's especially made for them. We want to do those things, we are adding more machine intelligence to tell if customers actually want something sweeter or less sweet," Cui said. "We want to make it more human."