Build your own drink mixing robot
yujiangtham.com
yujiangtham.com
If you spent some time making a very attractive machine that was fun for patrons to watch, mixed great drinks that were finished with a human touch, it could be a really interesting draw. I imagine a place with a beautiful/badass MIT-made drink-mixing machine would do quite well in Kendall square.
Create list of 8-10 interesting drinks that change weekly, that source from perhaps a dozen different liquors/fresh juices. The machines selects one of 4 glasses that was already clean, could precisely measure/mix/shake the drink leaving the bartender to garnish, present, squeeze fresh lemons into a container. I think you could have a quality experience.
One for my lottery win daydreams.
Use case: I like my Old Fashioned strong with a slice of lemon instead of orange. Make recipe, put online. Go to any bar with robot mixer: same Old Fashioned everywhere!.
That said, there are some places that do use quick mixers to mix up the classics. Garduños, a huge Albuquerque, NM mexican restaurant (as seen in Breaking Bad, season 5!) uses pre-mixed margarita mix from a keg and dispenses it with a typical bartender's soda gun. They've realized that most people who order "well" margaritas aren't that discerning and appreciate the consistency that a factory-mixed 'rita delivers. Garduños serves them by the gallon and the pre-mix saves them lots of bartender time when they're mixing their most popular cocktail.
This would never fly in a nice bar, though. These days, most big city bars are chasing the money and the money is in "craft cocktails". It's all about the ingredients and the customized drinks that are tailored to the customer's preferences. Bartenders are making a big show out of things like twisting a slice of orange peel to release its oils. The presentation is hugely important here and a robotic mixer just doesn't have the right vibe, in my opinion.
I rather think that this robot is a fantastic v0.01 in what could be the beginning of many hundreds of versions. Some of these future versions will have features that are better than what human bartenders can do, yet, many future versions will still be inferior.
Mixologists are mainly for show it really doesn't matter if its shaken or stirred.
http://whitelyan.com/assets/menu/white-lyan-drinks-menu-sept...
Restaurant automation was big in the 1960s and 70s, but it eventually became a flop. The technology mostly worked, but in the end, customers came more for the "culture" of the restaurant or bar. That is, to chat up the waitress, have a short conversation with the bartender, and most importantly, to not feel lonely.
Part of the "big city prices" is the exclusivity that place delivers, not how fine the process for making the current hot drink is.
Restaurants and bars aren't like most businesses. They don't just deliver product. They deliver some sense of shared culture, some sense of exclusivity, and some sense of 'here is where my kind of people belong.' That is also why we mock chain restaurants, some of which deliver perfectly fine food, but are seen as too 'cookie cutter' for the social experience we demand.
I say bring on the robots. I go to a lot of live music shows and waiting on drinks takes far too long and heaven forbid I get the "too cool for you" bartender and his weird douchbaggery on top of the drink I want. Maybe the bartender role will go the way of the elevator operator or travel agent role. Or higher end places will keep it and the rest will have a bartender sysadmin position to make sure everything keeps running, fills up supply, orders everything, calls service, etc.
Also unless it's a club it likely would need to scan the person's ID and confirm whether or not the person was who the ID mentioned adding some complexity to the robot that otherwise wouldn't be required for just serving drinks.
The sysadmin person you mentioned could definitely take on that liability role in addition to anything else he needs to do to support the robot.
I agree. It's the 21st century and robots should eSily cope with making a range of drinks.
And yet, the coffee from my local supermarket machine is undrinkably awful. (And this is my unrefined UK taste buds. I am nowhere near a coffee snob but I can tell cooked old milk). There's a Costa coffee machine in a supermarket. Costa are a big UK brand. The machine is big, about the size of a cola vending machine. That coffee is similarly awful.
So, yes, good robots would be brilliant. I just hope we avoid the lousy robots.
Also simplicity of troubleshooting is critical, in an industry where all non-customer facing labor has converted completely over to illegal aliens. A "paper jam" in the sandwich wrapper, or similar, cannot be allowed to completely shut down the facility. Also employee turnover is an issue, monkey-see monkey-do works pretty well for repetitive manual labor, not so well for obscure robotic troubleshooting procedures.
In summary we have numerous robotic / automated appliances but the majority of labor in a kitchen is best done by hand for numerous design and financial constraints.
The least human interaction I've seen in fast food is Febo in Amsterdam, where you just pick up a pre-made burger from a little "pod" of sorts and pay for it (by handing money to a person) at the back of the store.
I guess it all comes down to cost, which is unfortunate because it should be cheaper in the long run to cut your staff by 99%. Plus being the first robot restaurant kind of markets itself.
Not long ago I watched a bartender making oyster martinis and he was very careful to ring out each oyster to get all of their juicy goodness into the drink :-)
Although I like oysters, I wasn't tempted to try one...
Includes regularly-scheduled party!
They've found some traction with places like cruise ships and hotel conference facilities. They can drop one of these at a cocktail hour with a preset spend limit and the machine will happily pour drinks until the tab is maxxed out.
They had a successful Kickstarter last year: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/monsieur/monsieur-the-a...
I've had it before. It's pretty good. Makes for a unique rental for parties/events, but a little pricey for my tastes to buy at home. I believe they're going after rich folks with large in-home bars but without time to mix the drinks themselves.
Does anyone know specifically what the issues are to creating a Soylent bot? Or is it in the works?
Another tech thats been popular over the years is just tipping the bottle, which has the advantage of putting on quite a show and the disadvantage (or maybe not?) of splashing. You need a beefy servo because the center of gravity and torque are going to vary as the bottle empties.
Finally another tech often implemented in these robots is running the receptacle on an accurate-ish lab scale. Gram level accuracy is probably good enough although 0.1g accuracy would be better.
Its an old idea thats been around since at least the 80s home computer era, its been fun watching reimplementations and new ideas and new techs.
WRT to quality valves if you have a slow leak in the air input valve, even just a drip per minute, you'll slowly drain the bottle while it sits there. A more complicated arrangement with more valves can vent the bottle when its not supposed to be pumping which helps.
Your scale idea is excellent and I've seen it done. If you're sufficiently motivated its a great platform to play with PID controllers or at least PD (not I) control theory.
For a literature search I've seen this kind of machine in make magazine maybe in the 00s or at least a couple years ago and in some 80s era home computer magazines. It fell out of favor in the 90s or maybe I wasn't paying attention.
Advanced systems put a slight vacuum on the delivery hose to prevent dribbling although there's obvious cross contamination fears. From memory this was part of the reason the "tip the whole bottle with a R/C servo" guy took that approach, side from being visually more stunning. I remember that guy writing about an air traffic control issue where you can't have the neck of two bottles in the same airspace simultaneously, so extra delay timing is critical, can't immediately drop one bottle at the same instant one is lifting up.
I also recall reading about a design involving "hit the wine-in-a-box button with a servo horn" although that had variable flow rate problems and splashing issues, which might be worked around.
Great job, obviously!