Sydney University's Faculty of Architecture and Design is showcasing students' work with a bartending cocktail robot.
As it whirrs and spins in a noisy bar setting in the faculty's labs, the robot's arm flies from one liquor dispenser to the next along a rack of 20 bottles. Whether it's following a cocktail recipe or not seems irrelevant to the throng of student patrons waiting 10-deep for a drink. They're a thirsty mob and the drinks are free.
The bow tie around the "hand" of the robotic arm adds that little bit of class as it steadily pours eight drinks in a row without spilling a drop. Recent graduate Samantha Horlyck twitches as she recalls the hours of tedious programming and tweaking.
"The most difficult thing was getting the pour right which involved a lot of tweaking with the degrees of the pour and also the timing."
That's a skill that should hold a young architect in good stead for the future. Just replace Long Island Iced Tea with pouring a concrete slab at Australia's next Pritzker prize-winning construction.
Another graduate and part-time Robotics Co-ordinator Gabriele Ulacco says the robot highlights the interaction between machines and people.
When he says that questions of what people want to drink and when they want to have another drink were carefully considered in programming the robot, and that this is relevant to architecture, he's presumably wondering how to transpose this to the question of the kinds of structures people dream of living and working in.
The irony is that these precision robots are being used to achieve a more organic shape or feel than can be achieved by craftspeople with everyday tools and machines. One of the two large robots the faculty is experimenting with is the kind employed in car manufacturing but here it's busy cutting out organically shaped porcelain lampshades.
The second large robot meanwhile is taking photographs of visitors' faces and drawing them as abstract sketches on a large flatbed grid with a delicate paintbrush that regularly dips into an ink pot sitting to one side of the machine in a small retro gesture.
Recently, Ulacco's experimental design team relied on robotically cut and thermo-formed panels to create a pavilion for the Sherman contemporary art foundation. With a butterflied roof and mirror-polished stainless internal panels, the structure is something Jorn Utzon would get very excited about.
"I think we couldn't have seen five or 10 years ago how much robotics could get integrated into architecture" observes Marjo Niemela, manager of the Design Modelling and Fabrication Lab.
In the meantime, the cocktail robot has exhausted the ice supply and business has slowed at the exhibition launch. Creme de menthe is guaranteed to dampen the ardour of even the most enthusiastic designer.
