Robot Bartender: Saloon Craft to ABB YuMi

How the robot bartender grew from saloon craft and hobby barbots to Makr Shakr, cruise ship Bionic Bars and Kyoto's piloted robots, and where ABB YuMi fits.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/1/20265 min read

A robot bartender used to be a party trick. Now there are robotic bars on cruise ships, coffee robots in train stations and, from December, a sake bar in Kyoto where the robots behind the counter are steered by people who cannot work a normal bar shift. This post looks at how drinks were mixed before machines, how hobbyists and designers built the first cocktail robots, what is happening in 2026, and where ABB robots such as YuMi and GoFa have served drinks or could do so. It ends with home cocktail machines and the problems that still keep most bars human.

Small homemade machine with tubes and a robot face sticker pouring a flaming drink into a glass

A homemade robot mixing flaming drinks at a party in 2007. Photo: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How bartending went from saloon craft to cocktail robots

Bartending was a hand skill long before anyone thought of automating it. Jerry Thomas published his Bar-Tender's Guide in 1862, one of the first books to write cocktail recipes down so other bartenders could repeat them. In the saloons of the late 1800s a bartender poured, mixed, kept the till and kept order, all by hand. Recipes gave the proportions, but speed and showmanship came from practice. That mix of exact measuring and personal flair is what every robot bartender since has tried to copy.

Black and white photo of men at tables and a bar in an old saloon with a bartender behind the counter

A bartender raises a glass in a Southern California tavern around 1890 to 1900. Photo: C.C. Pierce via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first cocktail robots came from hobbyists and artists. In 1999 a group in Vienna started Roboexotica, a yearly festival where people build robots that mix, serve or even drink cocktails, partly as a joke about techno hype. Hackerspaces such as NYC Resistor built their own barbots from pumps, tubing and microcontrollers. These machines measured spirits well enough, but they were often slow and could only pour from the few bottles plumbed into them.

Glass globe on a brass stand with taps, part of an art cocktail machine

A cocktail robot on show at Roboexotica 2007 in Vienna. Photo: Normosphere / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Industrial arms brought the idea into real bars. Makr Shakr, a project that grew out of Carlo Ratti's work at the MIT Senseable City Lab, was first shown at Milan Design Week in April 2013 and then at Google I/O in San Francisco. Two arms shook, stirred and poured while guests ordered from a phone, and they could design their own recipes in the app. Royal Caribbean put the system on its ships as the Bionic Bar from 2014, with bottles hanging upside down above the arms, and it is now on nine ships. Makr Shakr builds its bars with KUKA arms.

Worker reaching up to rows of upside down liquor bottles above a teal robot arm in a lit bar

A crew member servicing the Bionic Bar on Harmony of the Seas, with bottles hanging above the robot arm. Photo: Thank You (23 Millions+) views / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Robot bars in 2026, and where ABB YuMi has poured

In some of the newest robot bars a person still does the serving, from far away. Ory Laboratory, a Tokyo company, will open OrySNACK Kyoto inside a bookstore in the Shijo Karasuma area on December 4, Japan Today reported on September 29. Its OriHime-D robots are piloted remotely by people with ALS, muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injuries and SMA, and they serve sake from Kitagawahonke, a Fushimi brewery founded in 1657. The crowdfunding campaign had raised about 7.4 million yen. Fully automatic kiosks are spreading too, such as the robotic coffee bar at Berlin's Ostbahnhof station.

Glass kiosk labelled robotic speciality coffee bar standing in a train station hall

The moc robotic coffee bar at Berlin Ostbahnhof station. Photo: Roy Zuo / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB's dual-arm YuMi has already worked behind a bar. At the Founders Forum in London in June 2016, ABB Robotics UK, Titan Reality and HAL Robotics built a cocktail station where guests put a glass on a sensor pad, YuMi recognised which drink the glass stood for, filled it and handed it to a human bartender to finish. In 2018 YuMi made coffee for shoppers at the Smartech store in Selfridges, London, from August to December. Both were demonstrations, and both used YuMi because it can work next to people without a fence.

Two armed ABB YuMi robot beside a coffee machine and a glass of water on a lit counter

ABB's YuMi making coffee at the Smartech store in Selfridges, London, 2018. Photo: ABB

For a commercial bar, the closer ABB example is food service. BurgerBots in Los Gatos, California, uses an IRB 360 FlexPicker and a YuMi to assemble burgers, which shows the same robots running a public-facing kitchen every day. A drinks station could use the same parts: a GoFa CRB 15000 or SWIFTI CRB 1100 to shake and pour, SafeMove to slow the arm when a guest reaches in, and OmniCore controllers to run the recipe logic. ABB has not announced a cocktail bar product, so this is a possibility. Our post on ABB robots in coffee covers the barista side.

White YuMi robot arm inside a glass cell with tubes of lettuce, tomato and onion

An ABB YuMi at work in the BurgerBots restaurant in Los Gatos, California. Photo: ABB

What comes next for robot bartenders at home and in bars

At home, the robot bartender has mostly become a capsule machine. Drinkworks, from Keurig Dr Pepper and Anheuser-Busch, launched in 2019 and was shut down in 2021, which showed how hard the home market is. Other machines pour from bottles you fill yourself, and hobby barbots like the ones built at hackerspaces are still a common first project. A real arm at home is far off. It would have to be cheap, quiet, easy to clean and safe around children.

Homemade drink machine with plastic jugs of mixers and tubes running to a dispenser

Barbot, a drink mixing robot built at the NYC Resistor hackerspace. Photo: Autopilot / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

In bars, the next step is probably cobots that share the counter with people. A cobot can measure to the millilitre and repeat a recipe all night, while a human handles the talking and the judgment about who has had enough. Programs for this kind of cell are usually built and tested in RobotStudio, and ABB's Wizard easy programming lets staff without coding skills change a sequence on a tablet. Hygiene matters as much as speed, since every surface the arm touches has to be cleaned.

White ABB GoFa robot arm on a wooden table in a room with a person working in the background

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table, the kind of arm that can share a counter with people. Photo: ABB

Some problems are not technical. Many places require a licensed person to check age and refuse service to drunk guests, so a robot bar still needs staff on duty. Robots also cannot read a room or talk a regular through a bad day, which is a large part of why people go to bars. The likely future is a mix: machines for speed and consistency at busy venues like ships, stadiums and airports, people for the craft, and remote pilots like the ones in Kyoto who get a new kind of bar job.

Two bartenders pouring and mixing drinks at a table covered with bottles and cups

Bartenders mixing cocktails by hand at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans. Photo: Bart Everson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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