Tea Brewing Robot: From Tea Ceremony to ABB Arms

A tea brewing robot has to do something simple that people spend years learning: heat water to the right temperature, steep the leaves for the right time and pour without a splash. Tea has had its rituals for centuries, and machines have been brewing it since the early 1900s. This post follows the cup from the Japanese tea ceremony and the bedside Teasmade to kiosk robots in China and Canada. It then asks where ABB's YuMi, GoFa and IRB 1200 robots could fit, and which problems still stand in the way of a robot that brews a cup you would pay for.

Tea bowls set out on tatami during a Japanese tea gathering. Photo: KuboBella / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From the tea room to the bedside machine

Japanese tea ceremony grew out of the powdered green tea that the monk Eisai brought back from China in the late 12th century. Tea master Sen no Rikyu, working in the 16th century, made it an art with a much smaller tea house and rustic bowls. He served as tea master to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who hosted the Grand Kitano Tea Ceremony in 1587. The earliest documented shared bowl of thick tea, koicha, dates from 1586. For thin tea, usucha, the host whisks a separate bowl for each guest, a sequence of cleaning, scooping, pouring and whisking that follows set motions.

A tea ceremony in Japan around 1880 to 1900, with the host kneeling at the kettle. Photo: DPLA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Machines came to the bedroom first. Birmingham gunsmith Frank Clarke bought the rights to a tea maker from Albert E. Richardson, and his patent was registered on 7 April 1902. He marketed it as "A Clock That Makes Tea!" The Goblin Teasmade design of 1934 was made from 1936 and was the first tea maker sold under that name. An alarm clock switched on the kettle, and steam pressure pushed the boiling water up a tube into the pot. Teasmades peaked in popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Science Museum in London holds a 1932 prototype and production models from 1945, 1966 and 1972.

A Goblin Teasmade, the bedside tea maker built around a kettle, teapot and clock. Photo: MortimerCat / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Kiosks followed the Teasmade by decades. In Toronto, Brian Lee and Rehman Merali launched teaBOT in 2013 to cut long café lines with grab-and-go tea. By July 2015 TechCrunch reported it had joined Y Combinator and opened a first US location at Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto. Customers mixed loose leaf teas in an app or on a kiosk tablet, and the machine made a custom cup in under 30 seconds, against about 10 minutes for most teas. Special lids with a filtered mouthpiece kept the leaves out of the mouth.

A vending machine selling bottled Uji matcha tea in Japan. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Robot arms enter the tea shop

Robot arms are now doing the work. In April 2026 the Chinese chain Tea Yan opened two stores in Shenzhen, at Shenzhen Bay MixC and MixC World, where self-developed arms grab the cup, add ingredients and hand over the drink within 30 seconds. Staff still add toppings by hand. A Dealroom profile describes Tea Cow Intelligent Technology, founded in February 2024, and its ChaXplorer N5, a machine with a multi-axis arm and AI vision meant to repeat the steps of gongfu tea. The profile is marked as AI-generated, so its details are unconfirmed.

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

Robot cafes are the nearest comparison. On 16 August 2026 JD.com's 7Fresh Coffee opened a 24 hour unmanned coffee shop at Galaxy SOHO in Beijing, and reports say it served 202 cups in one hour, a Guinness record claim. Reports say each drink takes roughly 20 to 30 seconds and the line can make seven or eight at a time. On 15 September COFE+ said its seventh generation robotic café had reached 75 countries. These are coffee machines, not tea, but they show that customers will order from a robot counter. Our post on robot baristas covers the same shift.

An ABB GoFa cobot loading parts into a machine at a small factory. Photo: ABB

ABB has already put a robot in a drinks bar. In 2018 an ABB YuMi made coffee at the Smartech bar in Selfridges, London, and a GoFa CRB 15000 can load and unload equipment beside people. ABB has not announced a tea brewing robot, so the fit here is a possibility. A dual arm YuMi IRB 14000 could handle a cup and a pot at the same time, and a hygienic arm such as the IRB 1200 Hygienic suits food areas. Programs are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio.

An ABB IRB 1200 Hygienic robot picking bananas, a food handling demo. Photo: ABB

What a robot tea room still needs

For homes, the likely path starts with a countertop machine that handles the heating, timing and pouring, as the Teasmade did, while a person chooses the leaves and carries the cup. The Tea Yan arms show the likely split: the robot does the repetitive cup work and staff add toppings, a division a home machine could copy. A full arm in the kitchen is further off. A robot that holds a pot and pours into several cups has to cope with hot water, spills and children, and it has to cost much less than a cafe robot.

Teasmades and other tea makers on show at the Science Museum, London. Photo: Sheridan Parsons / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Cafes and malls will adopt first. A tea robot needs a recipe database for each tea, since leaves differ in the water temperature and time they need. It also needs a way to dose loose leaf accurately, since a cup that is too weak or too strong is a failed brew. GoFa can be taught by guiding it by hand, and ABB's Wizard easy programming, the approach in no-code robot control, would let a tea shop adjust a pour without writing code.

A host prepares tea beneath a red parasol at an outdoor Japanese tea ceremony. Photo: Ermell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Several problems remain. Hot water and a customer at the counter mean the arm needs safe speed and force limits, which SafeMove provides on ABB controllers. A robot also has no taste, so someone still has to check that the brew is good. And a ceremony host does more than make tea: the guests are part of the event. A robot can serve quick cups, but a ceremony is a hosted event, so that part is likely to stay human.

A bamboo tea whisk, the chasen used to whisk matcha by hand. Photo: D-Kuru / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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