By Timothy Aeppel And Alistair Barr
SAN MATEO, Calif.--Some robots assemble cars or iPhones. Others
vacuum floors or roam Amazon.com warehouses. The four-foot-tall
ThinBot, with its flashing lights and blue chilling-chamber, makes
a mean cosmopolitan and 16 other cocktails.
"Most bartending robots are dispensing-machines. I wanted to
make mine more than that," said ThinBot co-creator Kevin Roche, a
54-year-old International Business Machines Corp. research
scientist who sported a "Make Drinks Not War" T-shirt at a recent
RoboGames competition.
Cocktail robots, as they're also known, were just one category
vying in the "Olympics of Robots," a competition better known for
machines that can tear each other's heads off.
The bartending niche is more delicate, but it does break into
two feuding camps.
On one side are the mavericks like Mr. Roche who see these
machines more as performance art, profit be damned. On the other
side are the pragmatists and would-be tech moguls who see robot
bartenders as the next big thing--if only they can work out the
kinks, of which there are many.
Can a robot card someone? Can it wipe down the bar? Can it
commiserate with a jilted boyfriend? And what happens when liquor
and juices gunk up the hoses--the bête noire of all cocktail
machines?
Royal Caribbean last year unveiled a robot bartender on its new
tech-theme cruise ship Quantum of the Seas, and several companies
have sprung up to market other versions. So the barriers aren't
insurmountable.
The Monsieur, developed by a team of Georgia Tech graduates
inspired after they felt they had waited too long for drinks at an
Atlanta Applebee's, plans to unveil 10 of its tabletop devices at
the Kentucky Derby in May.
"It's like a Keurig for liquor," said company president Donald
Beamer, noting that the machines--which sell for $3,999--will be
positioned in premium seating areas that previously had
self-service bars. Traditionalists shouldn't fret: The robots will
offer mint juleps.
Bill Sherman, creator of the Elixirator, sniffs at such base
practicality.
His machine, which also competed in the RoboGames, is made of
wood, decorated with plastic crystals and a fake flame "to give it
that Jules Verne, steampunk, 19th century sci-fi feel," said the
62-year-old electronics engineer from Hayward, Calif. It makes four
straight liquor drinks and six cocktails including a cactus needle
and a Russian orange.
When he is out with the Elixirator, Mr. Sherman transforms
himself into Dr. Hadacoff, an inventor from the future who became
stranded in the 19th century and wears a top hat, morning suit and
cravat.
Mr. Sherman and others in the artiste camp dismiss efforts to
build commercial machines. He said it is too difficult and
time-consuming to develop a robot capable of performing most of the
tasks human bartenders do. The Elixirator requires Mr. Sherman to
transfer liquor from the original bottles into wine bottles which
is all that will fit in the machine.
"A robot is not going to know you've drunk too much," he
said.
Samuel Coniglio, creator of CosmoBot, a pressurized,
rocket-shaped device with a large red start button that releases
steam, calls the commercial variety "ugly boxes," because they must
be designed generically to be made in volume and suit many
different customers.
Cocktail robot competitions began more than a decade ago in
Europe, where dispensing alcohol from machines is more accepted. An
artists' cooperative in Vienna has held annual competitions since
1999.
Aaron Muszalski, an American artist and tech entrepreneur from
San Francisco, has competed in Vienna four times, once with the
Stigmatabot, a life-size metal robot that dispensed wine from a
spout in its torso. That machine was bought by a collector in
Austria, who now displays it in his home.
"There's always a prize category for robots that are designed to
replace bartenders--but that category is the least
interesting...and most openly scorned," said Mr. Muszalski.
Whitney Deatherage, an American who helped organize the Vienna
event in December, ticks off some of the odder machines. High on
her list was the Fairy Juicer, a glass box that appeared to have a
green fairy fluttering around inside. As you turned a crank, it
would start to scream in a high-pitched voice and appear to be
squashed as a shot of green absinthe trickled into a glass.
Many of these contraptions, said Ms. Deatherage, "aren't aimed
at commercialization."
Unlike combat robots, which attract thousands of enthusiasts,
bartending has a small but devoted following. "I've made bartending
robots myself," said David Calkins, an organizer of RoboGames who
is also president of the Robotics Society of America, noting that
the difficulty in getting the machines to work is part of the
attraction.
"If it was easy, we'd all have C-3PO bringing us a cocktail when
we walk through the door," he said, referring to the golden robot
from Star Wars.
Travis Deyle, a Silicon Valley-based roboticist, built one as
his senior thesis project at the University of Nebraska and knows
lots of others who dabble in the specialty. "It's a classic nerd
project to build a booze-mixing robot," he said. But at the end of
the day, they aren't very practical.
Back at the competition, some purists quibbled over whether some
of the machines should even be called robots.
Paul Ventimiglia, a 28-year-old robotics engineer, showed off
"Outta Time," a machine with an arm that grabs a glass and brings
it under the right combination of liquor-carrying jars that light
up in different colors as they dispense alcohol.
"I don't care for this one over there," said Mr. Ventimiglia,
gesturing toward Mr. Sherman's Elixirator, which he argued wasn't
really a robot because of a lack of moving parts and the limited
variety of cocktails it could make.
"We're all doing it for art, but some barbots, all they do is
spit liquor into a cup," said Mr. Ventimiglia. "What makes it a
robot?" If it doesn't move, he said, "it's just a vending
machine."
Mr. Sherman would have none of it. The Elixirator, he pointed
out, does have some moving parts. Besides, he defines a robot as
any machine that does a menial human task.
At the end of the day, the more practical side prevailed.
Mr. Ventimiglia's machine took silver. ThinBot won gold. The
Elixirator didn't place.
Write to Timothy Aeppel at timothy.aeppel@wsj.com and Alistair
Barr at alistair.barr@wsj.com
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