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Bots play bartender at Roboexotica Festival in Vienna
Robots have way too many roles these days, ranging from security sentries to cellphone salesbots. Too mundane, you say? What about something that will surely please everyone at your party: a bot that can play bartender? Even better. Lucky for all of us with who fantasize about a world that involves inebriation through computation, the who's who of bartender bots expo recently took place in Vienna, at the 7th annual Roboexotica Festival. Wired News had a man on the scene, who drank up a mojito served up by the Robomoji (pictured), and watched another called Chapok make a gin and juice. While he wasn't getting liquored up, he managed to get in a few interviews with some of the masterminds behind these concoctions (the robots themselves were too shy), and spoke with the creator of Chapok, David Calkins, a professor of robotics at San Francisco State University. "Once all the robotics researchers here and elsewhere have worked out all the basic problems, that's when it takes off, and robots wind up in every household," he said. Well in that case, once these robots can make a decent White Russian, we'll sign up for the first beta home trials straightaway. Check the next page for a video of Robomoji in action from last year's show.
Beverage Tracker declares war on strong, free drinks
Once the world's bartenders are all replaced by robots, so-called liquor shrinkage will probably only occur if the bots can be hacked to measure out stronger drinks, but until that day, overpouring and undercharging will remain a $7 billion-a-year nightmare for bars in the U.S. alone. Well a San Francisco-based company called Capton says it can solve the problem today without resorting to expensive, unfriendly robots by using a system called the Beverage Tracker to keep a real-time tally of all the liquor that's been consumed and help shame the human bartenders into more accurate pour counts. The $10,000 to $20,000 setup consists of an RFID-enabled spout that's attached to every open bottle, a reader that collects and transmits information, and proprietary software that runs on the bar's existing computer; each time a drink is poured, the spout measures the volume of liquor, stamps that data with the time and bottle ID number, and sends it off to be collated into nightly reports that can be used as evidence for handing out the pink slips. So far over 100 establishments have installed the Beverage Tracker to keep their employees honest, with the latest being Treasure Island in Las Vegas -- which is good to know, because for the 15 minutes of free time we're given each year at CES, we can't afford to hit up a bar that's gonna be so frugal with the booze.[Via Roland Piquepaille]
