Another slow day at work? Or are you just getting bored of not doing anything? I don’t think there exist a person that never get bored at least once at work, except of course if you’re a panda nanny or work for national geography.
During that dizzy times of a day, when the universe conspires to make you fall asleep when you try really hard not to, there’s always this superhero that comes to the rescue. We call it coffee. I can’t thank coffee enough and I don’t think anybody else can either.
But what happens when you don’t even have the energy to grab that cup? The tiring hassle of going away from your comfortable and cozy chair to make that heavenly drink and bring it back to your desk to sip it while continuing your half-conscious cognitive state until the caffeine kicks in?
Well, I can attest that some researchers at IBM once had such a day for sure which led them to find a creative way to reduce the hassle of fetching a cup of coffee.
Thomas Erickson, cognitive objects researcher at IBM along with his 4 colleagues – Rogerio Feris, Maja Vukovic, and Clifford Pickover – have developed a way to make drones deliver coffee right at their desks.
I came to know about this from their recent patent filing at the USPTO. The coffee delivery system is intended to be used in offices and other closed environments.
This is not a simple drone delivery just in case you are thinking it to be. Rather it’s an intelligent fleet of drones that first detects who is in need of a cup of coffee. For this, the coffee delivery drones read facial expressions of a person to decipher his cognitive state.
Then it finds where the person is sitting the office and then you know what it does.
The fleet will be controlled by a centralized server that also stores preferences like how much sugar you want or at what time you usually grab a cup.
The facial recognition feature will also help drones locating you when you’re not on your desk and instead are having a chat with your co-workers. Isn’t it cool?
This isn’t the first time when IBM solved a problem by utilizing already existing things. In the past, for example, they disclosed how your social media friends can help you get back your lost smartphone.