Making and serving a coffee to order

The first robot cafe automated the moving of cups. Cafe X put a Mitsubishi arm behind glass at the Metreon, but the espresso itself came out of a WMF superautomatic, the kind that had been standing in petrol stations for years. What has changed since is the scale and the hand. Shanghai Hi-Dolphin's Cofe+ booths hold a grinder and an ice maker in two and a half square metres, turn out a drink in about fifty seconds and stay open all night with nobody there; Cotti announced robot stores in January 2024, though journalists sent to look found none. In Seattle, Artly records a coffee champion wearing motion capture gloves and replays the oscillations and tilts of latte art, which is what Trallfa did to a painter in 1969. The cup is not the whole of the trade. Coffee moves as it ages and extraction shifts with the humidity, so someone still has to taste it and change the grind.