Jetsons

Hong Kong found itself sitting at the cutting edge of robotic food delivery systems with the development of a brightly colored, autonomous robotic waiter by Cyber Robotic Technology. RoboWaiter #1 was the first of its kind and has made a real splash among restaurant goers.

The robot is currently doing its rounds in a Western themed restaurant in Hong Kong, and as it turns out it’s a great employee — it never takes breaks, it doesn’t ask for a raise and since it came on board the restaurant has seen a 20-30% increase in business.

The robot’s “job” is pretty simple, it rolls around the restaurant to customers, greets them with a menu and waits for them to say the menu item that they want. Besides this more obvious functions, the robot also dances and has a set of games it can play with the customers.

Robo Waiter #1 costs $5000, but the restaurant has been so happy with it’s performance they plan to bring on a robot chef in the near future. It might not be long before they replace the entire staff with kitschy robotic servers, like this restaurant in Nuremberg, Germnay did.

German Robot Restaurant

Here they have setup a gravity feed system that allows you to order from a touchscreen and have your meal delivered directly to you. It’s Jetsons meets Rube Goldberg and it looks really entertaining if you like watching your food fall from the sky.

CAFERO

Our final stop on our short tour of robotic wait staff takes us to CAFERO, a more narrowly-focused (if not more advanced) robotic barista. The brainchild of Korea’s Yujin Robot, CAFERO has a touchscreen face and can roll around taking orders for coffee. It isn’t really clear whether the robot can actually whip up an Espresso, but worse comes to worse it shouldn’t be that difficult to stash a Mr. Coffee in it’s innards.

CAFERO

The future is looking bright for robotic wait staff, but I think there is one major component missing. Sure, a robot is perfectly capable of getting your food to you on time, and you don’t even need to tip but the one thing it won’t do is lend an ear as you drone on about your day.

(Images)