Makr Shakr is kind of like something out of science fiction. This enormous bartending robot shakes, stirs and mixes cocktails to be just the way you like them, and was created and developed in Turin thanks to the experience and knowledge of big names such as Carlo Ratti. It’s controlled by an app and can combine dozens of alcoholic drinks with hundreds of mixers and extras, creating personalised cocktails in real time and offering literally thousands of possibilities. The movements of the robotic arms (modelled on Italian choreographer Marco Pelle’s gestures) are displayed on a screen behind the bar so that users can see that it’s really their drink being made, and customers can save their creations to reorder them again. In the future, the makers of Makr Shakr plan to include monitoring of alcohol consumption and blood alcohol too, in order to promote responsible drinking by creating awareness. For all the barmen reading this, fear not. The technology was not invented to put you out of a job, but rather as a type of social experiment to examine how people might embrace such technology, and to show how robotic tech is changing the interaction between man and machine. Watch the video and check out the images below to see more about how the technology works.
