Robot arm serves coffee to community

Posted by freemexy on July 22nd, 2019

Robot arm serves coffee to community

A University student’s startup robotic arm makes coffee for customers on the Engineering Quad. The Yummy Future Robot Café is a wheeled white cube with espresso machinery and a robotic arm encased in glass. Customers walk up a short ramp, select and pay for their beverage at the kiosk and watch the arm carry their cup to the machine, fill it with an espresso product and bring it out to them through a small opening.crp robot

If you’re unsure what to look for, you might miss the automated café. Its espresso was “one of the better coffees” he’s tasted, but University Police Department Officer Pete Milenkovic said he drove right past it at first glance.

“They might need a bit more attraction,” Milenkovic said.Yummy Future co-founder Guangzhe Cui is a grad student in Engineering. For Cui and his team, their café is the newest extension of the Internet of things: real-world, practical devices armed with Internet connectivity.

Cui earned his affinity for robotics during his senior year as an undergraduate student. While Cui interned at Google in early 2018, he realized it was the perfect time to enter the industry.

As robotics prices dropped due to competition and demand for food services grew in the United States, Cui envisioned automating a restaurant chain. With cafés’ high labor costs, a robotic coffee-shop made perfect sense, Cui said. It also fulfills his philosophy on the role of humans in the future of business.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 said.

In the short-term, the Yummy Future team is trying to find business partners, hire workers to maintain the station, obtain their patents and maximize revenue, Cui said. According to Yummy Future, the entire product cost around ,000 to make. At their current sales rate, Cui expects to break even soon.