Next robot revolution — a virtual bartender?

After the robot revolution of recent years — in which machines have taken over much of the rote manufacturing and service work that a generation ago was done by humans — a new wave of robots is set to take over more “intelligent” occupations, many experts believe.

Lawyers, accountants — and even bartenders — aren’t immune to being replaced by a machine.

For professionals in the latter category, the future is now, with the development by a group of Technion students of a computerized, robotic bartender, capable of mixing drinks using precise recipes, with just the right twist of lemon or lime to satisfy any taste.

It can’t, however, listen to the gripes and sorrows of barflies, in the way that a “real” bartender could — at least, not yet.

The RoboDrink machine was designed by Michal Friedman, Yoav Mizrahi and Zorik Gechman, under the guidance of Prof. Yossi Gil; tutorial teachers Boris van Sosin and Marina Minkin; and Dr. Nir Levy, academic relations director at Microsoft, using the open-source Arduino platform.

Somewhat like a vending machine for mixed drinks, the RoboDrink, in its basic form, holds eight bottles that are the ingredients for dozens of cocktails, martinis, and other mixed drinks, according to Friedman.

“We programmed it to mix drinks using combinations from three bottles of juice and five alcoholic beverages. Users choose a cocktail from the menu in the application we developed. When a glass is put on the platform at the edge of the track, the robot prepares the drink within seconds, based on a precise recipe.”

Friedman added that personal preferences, such as asking for a drink on the rocks, or for extra gin, or James Bond-style shaken — not stirred — are taken into account as well.

“We built everything from scratch,” explained Gechman. “This is a project that combines both hardware and software. We assembled the electronic components and built the electrical circuits. We wrote the software for an Arduino processor and developed an app that communicates with the robot via Bluetooth, based on recipes located on the cloud.”

Arduino systems are basically do-it-yourself kits that hackers and tinkerers can put together and program for a wide variety of purposes. They’re not considered particularly sophisticated, making RoboDrink more of an early prototype of a robotic bartender. However, the great advantage of the platform is that it can be expanded to include many other technologies — such as voice input. This means that future iterations of RoboDrink could allow customers to request drinks directly from the robot, instead of having to input their selection from a menu.

The designers didn’t say if they would supplement their system with the other important function served by bartenders — that of a sounding board for customers seeking to share their sorrows. Just figuring out how to get the robot to serve a perfect drink was challenging enough, said Mizrahi.

He explained: “We worked intensively on this project for three months. We are software people, but in order to complete our project we taught ourselves how to build the robot. We read a lot on the Internet and overcame a great many challenges.”

With machine learning and artificial intelligence modules, however, turning RoboDrink into a barroom shrink isn’t an impossibility. And bartenders, said Friedman, don’t feel threatened at all.

“The bartenders we consulted were very enthusiastic and loved the robot idea,” she enthused. “They said they’d be very happy to install one in their bars.”