Restaurants

Robotic coffee service machine replaces baristas

Image courtesy of Intel Corp.

December 30, 2020

Patrons at Crown Coffee, a coffee bar in downtown Singapore, can now place orders and be served by an autonomous robot barista named Ella, according to a press release.

Named after the wife of Crown Coffee's CEO and founder Keith Tan, Ella is a six-axis robot that runs on a constellation of Intel parts: an Intel Movidius vision processing unit, the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit and Intel Xeon and Intel Core processors. Ella takes orders remotely via an online app, makes the coffee, notifies the customer when it's ready, serves it and charges the customer's credit card.

Two years ago, Tan spotted a group of Intel Singapore employees having lunch in his shop. He greeted the group and pitched what he called at the time a "completely wild idea." The group, part of Intel's sales and marketing group, connected Tan with the right Intel teams — and the rest is coffee history.

The unit takes up a fraction of the space required for a traditional coffee bar, which translates into a cheaper retail footprint. Next, Tan is able to guarantee quality and consistency in every cup served. Ella also frees up labor, allowing Tan to reassign his staff to other in-store tasks like greeting customers or cleaning. But perhaps most important during the COVID-19 pandemic, customers are assured of safety as Ella operates in a sealed chamber. No human interacts with the product from the moment it's made to when it's served hot.

Tan and his team are planning to scale the solution to 40 other locations across Singapore, then to Japan and beyond.

For an update on how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting the convenience services industry, click here.