Images via Kim Hong-Ji/ Reuters //

Impressive…

In the latest instance of creative measures to enforce social distancing, a cafe in Daejeon, South Korea has recruited a robot barista to take orders, make coffees and serve drinks to customers.

The system uses a coffee-making robotic arm and a serving robot, and can make up to 60 different types of coffee as well as serve the drinks to seated customers. It also communicates and transmits information to other devices. To get around, it uses self-driving technology which calculates the best possible routes around the cafe.

It even talks, with the robot saying upon serving “Here is your Rooibos almond tea latte, please enjoy. It’s even better if you stir it.” Pretty insane hey.

To show off the intense speed, an order of six drinks took only seven minutes to process. The only human worker at the cafe was a patissier who was cleaning and refilling ingredients.

It’s definitely fair enough for South Korea, who is currently in the process of transitioning from intensive social distancing rules towards more relaxed measures, after more than 11,000 people were infected with COVID-19. Lee Dong-bae, the director of research at Vision Semicon which helped developed the barista robot, said “Our system needs no input from people from order to delivery, and tables were sparsely arranged to ensure smooth movements of the robots”.

Let’s hope these robots, as cool as they are, aren’t used forever, so hardworking human workers can get back in and working soon…