Robots Deliver Starbucks Coffee to Office Workers in South Korea

South Korean tech firm Naver has released a video of 100 robots operating at a branch of Starbucks in its headquarters building, named 1784, bringing coffee and snacks to employees in the rest of the building.

“The Starbucks on the second floor of 1784 is the world's most unique Starbucks,”  the company wrote in the caption. “With more than 100 service robots called ‘Rookie’ delivering Starbucks drinks to meeting rooms and private seats, and various experiments with a dual-arm robot.”

According to Naver, 1784 is the world’s first robot-friendly building and the largest robotics testbed, acting as a hub for the company’s innovations in robotics, AI and cloud services.

The robots operating within the building connect to Naver’s cloud-based system, ARC, which the company said acts as a “collective brain” for the robots, managing and orchestrating their actions in real-time. 

“ARC mind is the world’s first web platform-based OS dedicated to robots,” Naver said. “Providing an environment where web developers can create various robot services, it paves the way for even more robot services to emerge.”

Naver also created a robot-only elevator, RoboPort, which allows robots to “move swiftly and safely using dedicated vertical rails.” 

“Technologies such as collision avoidance, predictive robot coordination and pathfinding algorithms have been developed and implemented,” the company said. “Robots rapidly moving up and down call to mind the transportation systems of futuristic cities depicted in sci-fi novels.”

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