Instant coffee? Coffee pods? No: the truly optimized robotic coffee-making experience has yet to be revealed to the world!

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Background:

Making coffee can involve a number of steps (Figure 1). In an effort to streamline this process, many alternative coffee-making approaches have been devised.

Fig. 1: The “Moka pot” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moka_pot) method of making espresso is shown here.

Among the “simpler” approaches to making coffee include instant coffee (“just add water”) and the often-ridiculed (yet commercially successful) coffee “pod” system (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: These things.

The coffee pod machine (Figure 3) has been optimized to be minimally labor intensive. Some pods even include cream, so these machines are able to make a plausible latte at the push of a button.

Fig. 3: It seems like the coffee-making process has already been made as brutally efficient as possible… or has it???

Proposal:

A person might think that the coffee pod system shown above is the ultimate apex of streamlined efficiency. However: this is not true—consider that the coffee grinding and pre-processing must have still occurred earlier in the preparation process (even if this is invisible to the user).

Let us consider the minimal elements of the coffee-making-and-drinking experience:

  • 1. Take coffee beans as input (we will assume these were already roasted).
  • 2. Brew a coffee.
  • 3. Drink the coffee.

The coffee pod machine above really only handles step 2!

To fully optimize the system, we must design a robot that will handle steps 1 and 3. Behold, the fully-automated end-to-end coffee handling system shown in Figure 4!

Fig. 4: It turns out, even brewing the coffee is actually optional! Here, the robot takes the raw beans and “eats” (incinerates) them immediately.

Conclusion:

This system cuts out all the previous superfluous tasks involved in the coffee-preparation-and-drinking ritual. It should be an especially huge time-saver in France and Italy!

PROS: Should increase labor productivity. Frees up a substantial amount of time that was previously wasted in coffee-related tasks.

CONS: One might ask, well, if the robot just eats the coffee, why do we still order coffee? What even is the point of this robot? To which I retort (smugly): what is the point of anything???

Originally published 2024-07-29.