Robot to mix milk tea again? What's the trick this time?

Robot chefs are no longer the scene of science fiction, but are getting closer and closer to our daily lives. In late 2018, SoftBank invested $375 million in Zume, a pizza delivery company that uses robots to make pizza. Also at the end of 2018, Haidilao spent 150 million yuan to build a smart hot pot restaurant, with many robots serving as side dishes, serving dishes, cleaning dishes, and matching pot bottoms. In March of this year, Happy Lemon used a robotic arm to make milk tea in its first Talent Store.

Set:

It is now a clear trend to bring robots into the back kitchen and complete catering automation. In 2019, the customer "Little Monster in Tea" began to plan an unmanned milk tea operation station, hoping that a robot could support 18 SKUs (Stock Keeping Unit, single item handling), and place the entire system in a fully enclosed transparent glass room to show the entire operation process: ordering, manufacturing, and taking orders, and the whole process is unmanned. Customers can see the milk tea manufacturing process directly in front of the machine.

Customers are optimistic about the upgrade opportunities of traditional chain stall-shaped bubble tea shops. "New Tea Drink" has now gained the favor of capital in recent years as an independent track. The ready-made tea market is large and fast-growing. However, the threshold is not high, the product homogeneity is severe, the competition is very fierce, and the head brands often fall into product plagiarism disputes. Many stores rely on manpower. The tea manufacturing process includes many links such as tea extraction, boiling pearls, beating milk caps, adding ice cubes, etc., and "standardization" is a big problem. Sample blending and streamlined operation have become the key to ensuring a common taste and stable products - which also means that brands need to invest a lot of energy in staff training, product supervision and other aspects to complete the completion of thousands of stores.

Pain point:

The premise of replacing manpower with machines is to ensure product quality. For operators, the driving force of "robot substitution" is: standardized quality of machine products, stable power, all-day work, no worries about recruiting people, and more convenient operation. However, whether the robot can be truly borne depends on whether the cost of layout and operation and maintenance reaches the replacement node.

According to a third-party survey, the cost structure of the bubble tea shop in the follow-up operation is generally 5% of the ground rent and 3% of the manpower (different store types will be different). Therefore, the idea of adding a single store square footage effect comes from two aspects: one is to reduce the scale of the store, and the other is to reduce the human cost.

Therefore, for customers, the ideal store type is: a small store of about 6 square meters (the operation space required by the equipment is less than that of human operation), and the introduction of robots replaces manual labor. This means that if the operation and maintenance cost can be guaranteed to be not too high, with the extension of the operation cycle, with the advantages of low rent, less staff and low manpower of a small store type, the cost advantage of the robot milk tea shop will become more and more obvious.

With the solution in mind, after comparing the traditional industrial small six-axis robots, the customer turned to a collaborative robot with a compact structure, sensitive layout, and relatively simple programming.

Solution:

The Little Monster in Shanghai still chooses a larger operating area, and the store is equipped with two ELITE EC66 (6kg payload) collaborative robots. Two milk tea robots started left and right, and the task of the fresh milk area on the left was completed by one of the robots, including tea canister loading and unloading, negative pressure tea extraction, tea brewing, ultrasonic knife (cutting milk), and pouring milk into the milk storage tank, and the whole set of actions were taken by this robot. The one on the right serves as a fancy feeding process - this site has 18 milk tea flavors to choose from, the system sends instructions to this robot according to the information of the customer's order, and prepares flavored milk tea according to the taste, after the feeding is finished, the robot places the cup on the delivery line, and a cup of "freshly made tea" made by the robot is quickly delivered to the customer. Every 60 seconds, a cup of milk tea can be conjured, and the order is really completed, and the whole process is unmanned and on-site manufacturing.

In addition to the advantages of compact structure and small footprint, the ELITE cobot has a 360° rotation ± a single joint support, and the robot basically has no dead angles in the spherical operation area, so it can easily reach all points. The interactive programming of the teach pendant makes the debugging of the robot easier, especially for projects with various and complex actions such as milk tea concoction, where engineers plan the robot's path by dragging and dropping the teaching and point fine-tuning, so as to ensure that the project launch time is greatly shortened. With the launch of more experience stores and mini robot milk tea shops in the future, it is believed that collaborative robots will make the business of "freshly made tea" look new.

Robot to mix milk tea again? What's the trick this time?

Robot to mix milk tea again? What's the trick this time?

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