People gather around a robot arm in a café, half for the drink and half for the performance. Most automation in food and beverage still feels either like a vending machine or a novelty, and the real challenge is capturing the craft of a skilled barista or maker, not just the motion of pushing buttons. The difference between a decent latte and a great one often comes down to subtle pressure, timing, and feel.
Artly treats robots less like appliances and more like students in a trade school, learning from human experts through motion capture, multi-camera video, and explanation. At CES 2026, that philosophy shows up in two compact robots, the mini BaristaBot and the Bartender, both built on the same AI arm platform but trained for different kinds of counters. Together, they make a case for automation that respects the shape of the work instead of flattening it.
Designer: Artly AI
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mini BaristaBot: A 4×4 ft Café That Learns from Champions
The mini BaristaBot is a fully autonomous café squeezed into a 4 × 4 ft footprint, designed for high-traffic, labor-constrained spaces like airports, offices, and retail corners. One articulated arm handles the entire barista workflow, from grinding and tamping to brewing, steaming, and pouring, with the same attention to detail you would expect from a human who has spent years behind a machine. “At first, I thought making coffee was easy, but after talking to professional baristas, we realized it is not simple at all. There are a lot of details and nuances that go into making a good cup of coffee,” says Meng Wang, CEO of Artly.
The arm is trained on demonstrations from real baristas, including a U.S. Barista Champion, with Artly’s Skill Engine breaking down moves into reusable blocks like grabbing, pouring, and shaping. Those blocks are recombined into recipes, so the robot can reproduce nuanced techniques such as milk texturing and latte art, and adapt to different menus without rewriting code from scratch or relying on rigid workflows. “Our goal is not to automate for its own sake. Our goal is to recreate an authentic, specific experience, whether it is specialty coffee or any other craft, and to build robots that can work like those experts,” Wang explains.
“The training in our environment is not just about action: it is about judgment, and a lot of that judgment is visual. You have to teach the robot what good frothing or good pouring looks like, and sometimes you even have to show it bad examples so it understands the difference.” That depth of teaching separates Artly’s approach from simpler automation. The engineering layer uses food-grade stainless steel and modular commercial components, wrapped in a warm, wood-clad shell that looks more like a small kiosk than industrial equipment.
A built-in digital kiosk handles ordering, while Artly’s AI stack combines real-time motion planning, computer vision, sensor fusion, and anomaly detection to keep quality consistent and operation safe in public spaces where people stand close and watch the whole process. “Our platform is like a recording machine for skills. We can record the skills of a specific person and let the robot repeat exactly that person’s way of doing things,” which means a café chain can effectively bottle a champion’s technique and deploy it consistently across multiple sites.
The ecosystem supports plug-and-play deployment, with remote monitoring, over-the-air updates, and centralized fleet management. A larger refrigerator and modular countertops in finishes like maple, white oak, and walnut let operators match different interiors. For a venue, that means specialty coffee without building a full bar, and for customers, it means a consistent drink and a bit of theater every time they walk up.
Bartender: The Same Arm, Trained for a Different Counter
The Bartender is an extension of the same idea, using the Artly AI Arm and Skill Engine to handle precise, hand-driven tasks behind a counter. Instead of focusing on espresso and milk, the robot learns careful measurement, shaking, or stirring techniques, and finishing touches that depend on timing and presentation, all captured from human experts and turned into repeatable workflows. “If the robot learns the technique of a champion, it can repeat that same pattern at different locations. No matter where it performs, it will always create the same result that person did,” Wang notes.
Dexterity is the key differentiator. The Bartender uses a dexterous robotic hand and wrist-mounted vision to pick up delicate garnishes, handle glassware, and move through sequences that normally require a trained pair of hands. The same imitation-learning approach that taught the BaristaBot to pour latte art is now applied to more complex motions, so the arm can execute them smoothly and consistently in a busy environment.
For a hospitality space, the Bartender offers a way to standardize recipes, maintain quality during peak hours, and free human staff to focus on conversation and creativity rather than repetitive prep. Because it shares hardware and software with the BaristaBot, it fits into the same remote monitoring and fleet-management framework, making it easier to run multiple robotic stations across locations without reinventing operational infrastructure for each new skill type.
Artly AI at CES 2026: From Robot Coffee to a Skill Engine for Craft
The mini BaristaBot and the Bartender are not just two clever machines; they are early examples of what happens when a universal skill engine and a capable arm are pointed at crafts that usually live in human hands. For designers and operators, that means automation that respects the shape of the work, and for visitors at CES 2026, it is a glimpse of a future where robots learn from experts and then quietly keep that craft alive, one cup or glass at a time, without demanding that every venue become bigger or that every drink become simpler just to fit a machine.
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The post Artly Robots Master Latte Art and Drinks for CES 2026 Debut first appeared on Yanko Design.
