What kind of new experience is it for a hand-punching robot with a robotic arm?

Dotcom Space is a main coffee space, located in Zhichun Road, Beijing. Walking into here, the spacious storefront and the use of a large number of Nordic elements are my first impression.

The difference with ordinary coffee shops is that most of the more than 40 employees in Dotcom are technicians. They all belong to Dotcom's Creator Lab called Bubble Lab, which focuses on the research and development of automation equipment used in real-life scenarios.

The basement of the coffee shop is the team's main product development site. Ken, product manager at Bubble Lab, told Curiosity Daily: "the team is developing a new product at a rate of about every two months."

Robotic arm coffee machine

The typical product developed by Bubble Lab is this robotic arm hand-brewing coffee robot.

The researchers first record the barista's movements with a high-speed camera, analyze them, and then input the data into the robot's arm, so that it can copy the barista's movements and brew the corresponding boutique coffee at the same angle and time.

Ken told Curiosity Daily: "it is designed to free baristas from repetitive and boring brewing work and to focus more on the recipes and processes of coffee making."

However, in the opening of Dotcom Space, we failed to see the entity of the robotic arm hand coffee maker, which is said to be still in debugging. At CES Shanghai, it takes 10 min to use this machine to brew four cups of coffee.

After the novelty, the coffee robot doesn't look practical enough.

Robotic arm ice cream machine

What I really experienced at the scene was this ice cream machine, which has a robotic arm similar to a coffee maker. When the guest chooses the ice cream flavor and completes the scan payment on the external iPad of the machine, it will start to work automatically.

The whole production process is about 2 min, and the robotic arm will hand you the ice cream from the window without manual operation.

Intelligent faucet

The triangle-supported spherical object is a smart faucet developed by Bubble Lab. It is connected with the water pipe under the desktop and the iPad on the desktop.

On iPad, you can choose the appropriate effluent temperature and drink type. After coming out of the water, the three-legged bracket tube in the intelligent faucet can automatically clean the inner wall.

In Dotcom Space's store, a lot of technological elements can be found on careful inspection. Some of them are developed by Bubble Lab itself, and more are technology products they import from other companies.

The second floor of the space is a small 3D printing wall, composed of 20 3D printers, which can provide customers with small 3D product printing services at a price of 0.8 Mao / g.

The walls of the space are equipped with a thermostat from the smart home brand Nest. A domestic company specializing in the transformation of Nest products, in cooperation with Dotcom Space, installed a thermostat adapted to China's new air system in the store.

It can intelligently identify the habits of indoor users and adjust the room temperature to the most appropriate state by recording indoor temperature data.

Dotcom's labs position themselves as a hardware development team for machine research and applications. In the future, they hope to allow more hardware teams to enter the space and work together, and they are also prepared to apply the products they have developed in a larger market.

But the Dotcom Coffee team admits that it is still groping for a clearer business model and how to make these technology products better serve the space, rather than just furnishings and gimmicks.

Dotcom Space's model is also easily reminiscent of Creator Space, which became popular in Beijing a few years ago.

By contrast, Dotcom Coffee may be a few years late before they show a clear difference.