WHY ARMS? Why not just hook up a 30 hoses to bottles, add a shaker, a decent ice dispenser AND have it pour into a damn glass. Done. Use a massive screen with 100 drinks + games (sometimes you win doubles etc). Walk into mc donalds they already do this (one nozzle for 20 drinks).
Showmanship/Entertainment. The whole point of being in Vegas or on a cruise ship (prior installation), is to have a spectacular experience. An efficient, mundane, McD's dispenser isn't quite the same.
> The whole point of being in Vegas or on a cruise ship (prior installation)
My best friend works on RCCL's Quantum (or rather, its one of the ships he's worked on recently), and one of his responsibilities is maintenance of the robotic arms that perform the drink making experience [1]. He's says they're constantly down or in need of major repair while operating.
Will robotics get there? For sure. Are they there yet? Not in a cost effective manner. Still cheaper to have someone making tips behind the bar (unless, as you said, its purely showmanship).
I don't unfortunately, I'm just told they're constantly down for maintenance. A typical new robotic arm is ~$80k-$150k (varies widely based on implements, programming, etc); unsure of the exact model RCCL uses, but even at the low end the install cost ~$200k considering equipment costs + tech labor on board.
Contamination is a big issue. Lowly McDonalds changed to a 'flavor robot' shake machine, where the ice cream(sic) is always vanilla and they deliver other flavors (chocolate, strawberry, mint etc) through tubes for each dispense.
I like vanilla, but can't get it any more. I get a mixture of vanilla and whatever-the-last-guy-got. Because, tubes leak/drip/have to void of the previous flavor.
I instantly thought of this video snippet [1] from the 80s about a robot bartender, which incidentally I only know from the Mitch Murder song "In the News." [2]
>Finally, the last place you want to see a computer let alone a robot is in your neighborhood bar. Yet it seems the sweep of technology has no limits. In San Francisco this week, the world's first robot bartender was unveiled. The robot can talk, can take spoken orders and can mix two-hundred different drinks. But on the first test run, when the waitress yelled out "Give me a Bloody Mary and a beer," the robot knocked the glass off the bar onto the floor and poured beer all over the counter. The robot's designer said there were still some bugs to be worked out.
A simpler version of the same idea has been implemented before, eg. the Nottinghack BarBot
https://youtu.be/20SI1o-t1F4
When they demoed it at EMF camp 2014 they had a mobile interface where you could select from a menu of cocktails and thet you waited in a queue for it to be made.
Yes, please put this everywhere. At least one bar in all bars.
I'm so tired of waiting to get the attention of the bar tender. It's not the fault of the bar tender. In so many places they are horribly understaffed.
There's a bar in Santa Cruz that gives you an RFID bracelet hooked up to your CC, and you pour however much you want from >30 taps on the wall. Then you pay your per-ounce tab upon exit. Only beer and wine but a cool idea. Here's a link: http://www.pourtaproom.com/santa-cruz/
A local brewery (Accomplice Beer Company) just opened that does something identical, just with an RFID card that you plop on a stand above the tap rather than a bracelet. Wouldn't surprise me to learn they're using the same hardware.
Actually, in Europe we have table service at a lot of bars, it beats any of this hands down, while being engaged in a good conversation the beer and anything else you like is delivered to your table. It doesn't get much better than that IMO.
They already exist. They are called vending machines. Instead of a pushbutton these have a voice interface. Big deal. All the robot parts beyond the vending machine are just for show. If you like the show, cool. But dont expect this to reduce costs. The market has rejected vending machines in bars for good reasons.
Can this machine do the legal part of the job? Does it know when to cut someone off or call the cops? Can it spot a fake ID? Bartending as a profession isnt under any threat.
Could have one attendant supervising 2-3 vending machines in a busy venue. In supermarkets in Australia, one attendant supervises 6-8 automated checkouts and it works well.
If not vending machines, at least separate the expensive cocktail mixing from the beer and wine orders. It's painful waiting to order a round of bottled beers when the person just in front of you wants 5 random cocktails.
There are bars in Europe where each table has its own beer tap in the middle, and you are charged by volume poured. Nice gimmick.
The people who want complicated drinks also tend to like complicated coffee. It isnt about the drink. Its about getting someone to listen to your complex order and then getting ti b-tch about it when they make a mistake. Add a robot and that scheme dissapears.
tldr from my pervious experience managing bars: neat idea but it wont fly from what I saw.
First, these robots are WAY too slow. A more efficient mechanism than those arms is sorely needed. A good bartender on a busy night can make ~100 drinks an hour (not at a bar with lots of complicated drinks). There is no way these are going to keep up.
Handling an issue with the machine means at least having someone there to troubleshoot but also likely means having a human bartender on staff anyways. If it breaks somehow you have a large decoration I guess but more likely an angry bartender with no backup.
Also the space these would take up is prohibitive to most restaurants. Bartenders will need space to move back and forth around their bar, stock items, etc. If they are sharing the bar with a robot I hope they aren't pulling from the same stock because they will both want to make cocktails from the same ingredients, which would be entertaining to watch at least. Humans can navigate that blockage more easily: "Hey I need 6 gin and tonics and two rum and cokes" vs a queue where those orders may be mixed up. Knowing how to manage that takes more than simple grouping.
As someone who has used the Makr Shakr system, not having to wait for waitstaff to come around, wait for them to write down your custom drink order, wait while they walk around and ask anybody else if they want anything, wait for bartender to make the drinks, wait for waitstaff to bring the drinks back to your table... a pretty slow process from start to finish.
The robotic bartender experience was far superior, and allowed you to customize your drink, save it for future ordering, and have it prepared with automated precision (so it tasted the exact same, every time.) And because you could queue up orders whenever you wanted, you were never looking around for waitstaff. It was great!
Admittedly this is a much different scenario than a bar in a college town on $1 draft night, but I don't think that's the target of this "first gen" robotic bartender.
I think you make a good point. I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. A very common mistake from engineers who become entrepreneurs is to not understand the markets they're trying to enter, or even their customers. They think they have a cool tech solution and everybody will see the world like they do. Then they launch and find out they have a novelty that loses money.
I don't know the specifics of this business, but trying to build a robot for X without understanding X is a great way to lose money.
This soon-to-be Vegas robot looks cool! In the meantime, if you want to try a robot server in San Francisco, my friends and I installed one in Folsom Street Foundry in SOMA. The bartender still makes the drinks but loads the Robot which brings it to the tables. If you are interested, check out the youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bab7E1Da6WA
Seriously though, I bet eventually we'll have a robot that can do that far more accurately than a human. Like a jet from one of those 'jumping fountains', of liquor, 20 feet away, nothing but net.
I wonder what it takes to make this legal--I've been to corporate events with free beer and perhaps wine where there's still a bartender, presumably for legal reasons.
It seems like there may be a reason robot bars first launched at sea.
It reminds me of CafeX, which makes coffee. In the case of CafeX, it's mostly ostentatious. There is very little functional purpose for the arm, and that arm is not cheap. When I went to try it in SF there was just one person in front of me, but there was a paid employee who apologized for the machine queueing drinks incorrectly which made it even slower than it already was. Basically instead of using one of the 2 coffee makers, it waited for the previous order to finish before making my drink. So from a functional perspective, at least in that instance, they made the coffee vending machine worse and roughly 10x as expensive, and then another 10x as expensive if you consider real estate. To be fair, the coffee was good, not great.
In this case though, it looks like the arms actually serve an important function - shaking. I have no idea how well it works as I've never tried it.
With regards to the unit economics of these things I don't know the details, but people often underestimate how expensive these are by as much as an order of magnitude.
Autodesk had this at their yearly conference a few years ago. It's pretty neat, but of course only one of the arms was working when I tried to get a drink!
There is an invisible "sensor curtain" around the robots. I accidentally put my camera too far "in" and the robots stopped instantly. As soon as the attendant saw everything was OK (and helpfully explained to me what happened) she pushed a "resume" button on the control panel and they continued right where they left off.
It's hard to tell because they kept having cuts and slowmo. It would be nice to see a video of a full drink being made.
Still, even a slow robot is preferred to having to wait for attention from the bartender before putting in your order. It's so frustrating to have to break away from an interesting conversation so that you could keep your eye on the bartender as he/she slowly makes their way to your area of the bar.
I'm at a bar to socialize, not to wait several minutes away from my friends trying to make eye contact with the bartender.
