We couldn’t make Roboexotica in Vienna, Austria this year (check out last year’s coverage), so we asked [Bre Pettis] to act as our liaison.

Last night was the opening party of Roboexotica, the worldwide gathering of cocktail robots. It was a blast! Pictured above is Robovox, a 40 foot high robot that you can text message to and it will say what you text to it!

I was running my robot arms as a competition, armatron style, to get cherries into a shot glass.

The Reprap that Marius, Philipp, and the gang over at Metalab made last year that failed was revived and cranked out shot glasses all night!

Here are my photos. More photos tagged Roboexotica are coming in all the time, stay tuned!

• ToorCon September 26-28 San Diego, CA – In its tenth year, ToorCon has always been one of our favorites. The conference is fairly small, but features great content like last year’s fuzzing talk.
• Arse Elektronika (NSFW) September 25-28 San Francisco, CA – Happening the same time as ToorCon, this conference covers the sexual side of human and machine interaction. The device list has gems like The Seismic Dildo, which only turns on if there is seismic activity in the world.
• Maker Faire October 18-19 Austin, TX – It’s Maker Faire! In Texas!
• Roboexotica December 4-7 Vienna, Austria – The premier festival for cocktail robotics is also back for the tenth time. They’re always looking for more exhibitors. Check out our Hackit for ideas.
• 25C3 December 27-30 Berlin, Germany I think we pretty much covered all the bases on this incredible conference yesterday.

Did we miss anything?

To us the BF Ice Cube Gun, you first place your glass below the the target.

Then you load your ice chunk into the CO2 powered cannon and fire. When it strikes the target the ice shatters and falls into the glass. If you hit the target accurately, it will also pour alcohol into the glass as well.

Robomoji is a perennial favorite. The bot is incredibly ponderous but fun to watch as it makes mojitos. It squeezes limes, measures brown sugar, muddles everything, and even has a combination ice maker/crusher.

The conference even embraces bar food bots as evidenced by the Perpetual Popper. The machine pops popcorn on single kernel at a time by placing it a the focusing point of a concave mirror. The whole unit acts as a heliostat orientation itself to the sun.

Although not a robot, the most impressive shenanigans came from The Provider. monochrom decided to use a cement mixer to mix and serve screwdrivers. Sean Bonner provides us with videos of its first and last runs (you’ll see why).

More photos are being added all the time to Flickr.

Iceware via rapid prototyping: As we type this post, [Bre] is in the background attempting to build a RepRap style rapid prototyping machine that will construct shot glasses on demand. We were thinking it would be neat to cut beverage glasses out of blocks of ice using a milling machine, but why stick with normal milling equipment? It’s ice right; you could be doing something stupid like using a butane torch for your working tool. We then began to wonder “Has anyone built an ice based rapid prototyping machine?” You could just deposit water on a frozen surface to create your glassware. A group at the University of Missouri has been investigating “rapid freeze prototyping“. Since they’re using water, they only have to create the frozen shell of the part and then fill in the empty cavity with water to create a solid.

Industrial flare bot: Use two large industrial arms to perform cocktail flare moves. This is a similar idea to the juke_bots, industrial DJ bots. The goal would be to put on a good performance while attempting to appear less robotic than Tom Cruise; shouldn’t be too hard.

The separator: There are a few cocktails out there that are carefully poured so that they appear layered when served. We’d love to see a bot that clumsily mixes all of the ingredients together and then runs it through a centrifuge to create the desired product.

Those are three of our ideas. Leave your cocktail robotics ideas in the comments-this whole discussion reminds me of those garbage disposal based margarita machines we saw a couple years ago.

…or it’s just an excuse for a bunch of smart people to get together, build robots, and drink.

The word ‘robotics’ seems to always imply ‘efficiency’, but that’s definitely a no-no at Roboexotica. Fine tuned manufacturer grade cocktail production is not the goal; personality, charm, character, all of these qualities are important in machinery destined for Roboexotica. You can already see some photos from the event setup on Flickr and we’ll be bringing you more posts on the individual machines as we get more information/drinks.