Cafe X has developed a robot that will dispense and serve coffee to a customer.
Henry Hu wants to use technology to improve efficiency in the service industry. He sees many opportunities in the food service industry and on January 30 launched Café X at the Metreon in San Francisco. Café X is a robot serving system for coffee that remains faithful to the production desires of the coffee roasters.
We spoke with Henry Hu to talk about the coffee serving robot and the American launch. Henry said that Café X is using a six axis Mitsubishi robot, rated for a 4-5 kilogram payload. Using a Linux controller and choosing from the available library of motions the robot is programmed to obtain a cup, place it in the dispensing area to fill the cup, and then move the full cup to a staging area. The customer can place an order through the Cafe X app, and then walk up to the kiosk and enter their information. The robot arm will deliver the proper cup to the customer. The long form goal of this system was to take the ordering process from a ten minute cycle to something closer to ten seconds, while roasting the best possible cup of coffee.

Learning curves during the development and launch included finding the right motion paths in the robot to cleanly deliver the cups to the desired positions. Because of variation in the cup sizes errors occasionally popped up with the cup sensor in the arm failing to sense the cup’s presence. Wishlist items for future revisions of the Café X robot might be different cup sizes, and a self-calibration program that allows the system to completely right itself after an earthquake or seismic event.
Café X is a great novelty and enjoying huge press this week as people talk about a coffee serving robot, but I see the huge leap in efficiency as the bright point for manufacturing. If a process can be reduced from minutes to seconds and incorporate repeatable and accurate results then this is a great application of industrial robotics.
(Images courtesy Cafe X and The Hatch Agency)