We’re building a robot bartender to serve you faster in eating clubs

Meet Yuan Wang: a junior Math major in Charter who’s starting his own company called Fountain Five.

While bar hopping over the summer, he became frustrated with slow, overcrowded, and often disorganized spaces in the service industry.

Out of that frustration came an idea only a Princeton student with an engineering background would consider obvious: why not just replace bartenders with robots?

Yuan Wang ’17 wants to fix the bartending industry – with robots

The concept sounds like something out of a science-fiction film, and is laughable the first time you hear it. But fast-forward six months, and Yuan has already recruited four Princeton engineers to take his idea seriously – seriously enough to start building robots.

Fellow Charter members Ilya Krasnovsky and Eric Principato are both seniors in the MAE department.

Ilya spent two summers working on spacecraft design for the US Air Force, while Eric has been conducting university-funded drone research—you know, typical college pastimes.

Ilya ’16 designs spacecrafts for the Air Force

Together the two founded the Princeton Robotics Club, making them the perfect candidates for Yuan’s team. Throw in Aarav Chavda—Yuan’s roommate who has experience building robotics for Department of Defense contractors, and Aana Bansal — a sophomore ORFE major who helped develop surgery-conducting robots for The Children’s National Medical Center—and you’ve got a pretty loaded startup team.

Ilya and Eric co-founded the Princeton Robotics Club

Together the group enrolled in Princeton’s entrepreneurs’ incubator at the Keller Center and began brainstorming. While the project is still in conceptual stages, Ilya spearheaded the design of a fledgling prototype for essentially no cost. He described it in terms were well over my head, but then again I’ve never blueprinted spacecrafts for the US military.

“It’s basically like a linear actuator rail. You put your cup on it and it slides back and forth. And then there’s a bunch of mason jars on top with pumps feeding down.

“It goes to a station, a certain liquid pours in, it goes to another station, another liquid pours in.”

Princeton’s first robo-server

The prototype won’t look anything like the final product, but the team uses it to help outsiders begin to conceptualize how it will work. Still, Yuan hopes Fountain Five will do a lot more than just pour drinks.

Because the turnover for bartenders is so high, on-boarding new employees can cost bar owners precious time and money. Many servers are inexperienced, and it can be difficult to memorize complex recipes, keep tabs on who has or hasn’t paid, and remember the preferences of frequent customers.

Bar hoppers complain of under-filling, while managers dread over-fills. The Fountain Five robot would automate these processes and eliminate errors using precise calculations and extensive data storage.

Yuan even hopes the advent of robotic bartending could make nights out more fun by connecting customers to their friends as they order. The Fountain Five system will link to the phones of its customers for more personalized experiences.

Anna Bansal ’18 helped build a robot that perform surgeries at The Children’s National Medical Center

He said: “For example, you want to pull down the template of a margarita, but you want to up the amount of triple sec, and maybe have a split between a silver and anejo tequila, you can do that on the app and have the robot customize it perfectly. If you like it that much, you can share it with your friends.”

Yuan spent the majority of his summer cold-calling bars for their feedback, and says he’s already received interest from a number of venues who see the fiscal value in cutting labor costs through automated serving.

He added: “We do want to be full service to fully replace human labor.”

Of course, implementation of the idea is still a way away. The group has only been together for a few months and advancing from their current prototype will require some serious funding.

In the meantime, the group is focused on designing the digital aspects of their product to showcase to potential clients and investors.

“In the near field you can’t really expect to have a robotic bartender serving Charter Club.”

No word yet on when the first version of the product is slated to drop. After all, Eric and Ilya have to get their theses out of the way first.