Case Study: A New Autonomous Bubble Tea Shop? Two "elites" participated

Nowadays, robot chefs are not only appearing in science fiction, but increasingly in our daily cooking applications. At the end of 2018, SoftBank invested $375 million in Zume, a pizza delivery company that features robots producing pizza. At the same time, Haidilao Hotpot spent 150 million yuan to build a smart hot pot restaurant, with multiple robots responsible for dispensing, delivering meals, washing dishes, and selecting hot pot soup. In March 2020, Happy Lemon built their first smart beverage store, using a robotic arm to make drinks.

01 Background

Automating meal production by making robots part of the kitchen is a clear trend. Our customer, Bubble Guai, began planning to build an autonomous bubble tea retail station in 2019, hoping to demonstrate the fully autonomous bubble tea production process in a sealed glass workstation with robots that can support 18 SKUs, including ordering, brewing, and taking orders. (Stock Keeping Unit). Customers can see the process of making bubble tea directly through the glass.

Our client is looking forward to completing the upgrade of the traditional bubble tea retail station. Over the past few years, the concept of "new drinks" is independently attracting more and more investment. The market for these freshly prepared beverages is large and continues to grow rapidly. However, the low threshold for entering the market has brought many problems such as product homogeneity, fierce competition, plagiarism disputes (even for top brands), and large labor costs. It is difficult to standardize the beverage brewing process, which has many processes such as brewing tea, preparing milk caps, and adding ice. Sample retention and matching, as well as production with the assembly line, are key factors in maintaining consistent beverage taste and quality, which means that to achieve these goals,

The main difficulty

The premise of replacing human labor with robots is that the quality of the beverage is consistent. For the owners of beverage stations, the motivation to replace them with robots is the stability of quality and efficiency, the all-day shift system, stable employment, and easier management of beverage production. However, whether bots are truly accepted by such applications depends on whether the additional profits they bring can offset the deployment and operational costs.

According to a third-party survey, the subsequent operating costs of the new beverage station include about 50% of the station rental fee and 30% of the labor cost (depending on the type of store). Therefore, the increase in profits is mainly due to the reduction of the size of the station and the reduction of labor costs.

03Ideal store type

Based on the above factors, the ideal storefront should be around 6 square meters (with less workspace for equipment and robots) where robots will replace human employees. If operating costs are at a relatively low level, this will bring significant cost advantages as the operating cycle becomes longer and longer, while reducing rental and labor costs.

With this solution in mind, our customers turned their attention to cobots that are compact, flexible to deploy, and easy to program.

The space of the Shanghai Bubble Monster demonstration store is still relatively large, and two ELITE EC66 (6kg load) collaborative robots are installed.

Two robots work together on both sides, and one robot on the left is responsible for loading and unloading tea sets, extracting tea leaves under negative pressure, brewing tea, opening milk boxes with ultrasonic knives, and pouring milk into storage bottles. The one on the right is in charge of preparing the 18 different flavors of different ingredients that the customer chooses when ordering. After the entire beverage preparation procedure, the robot places the beverage on the transport line that will deliver the beverage to the customer.

Case Study: A New Autonomous Bubble Tea Shop? Two "elites" participated

Every 60 seconds, a cup of bubble tea can be produced, and the whole process of ordering, preparation, and receiving orders can be completed.

In addition to the advantages of compact structure and small footprint, each single joint of the ELITE cobot supports ± 360° rotation, and the robot has basically no angle that cannot be reached in the spherical working range, so it can easily reach all points. The interactive programming of the teach pendant makes robot commissioning easier, especially for complex projects such as tea brewing. Engineers can precisely plan the robot's path with drag-and-drop commands, ensuring that the completion time of the project is greatly reduced.

In the future, with the launch of more demonstration stores and mini robot bubble tea shops, it is believed that collaborative robots will bring a new look to the "fresh drink" business.

Case Study: A New Autonomous Bubble Tea Shop? Two "elites" participated

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