A robot barista has been introduced at a café in Daejeon, South Korea to help serve customers and also to minimise the risk of human-to-human Covid-19 transmission.
The robot is almost the height of a human, with a screen where the face would be and spaces in its body to secure cups of coffee while bringing them to customers. It speaks to customers as it delivers their orders. An order of six drinks delivered through a kiosk took just seven minutes to fulfil.
“Our system needs no input from people from order to delivery, and tables are sparsely arranged to ensure smooth movements of the robots, which fits well with the current distancing campaign,” – Lee Dong-bae, Director of Research at Vision Semicon.
