In a groundbreaking showcase of robotics, South Korea’s new office building for Naver features an extraordinary Starbucks.
This café is part of a larger experiment to integrate advanced robotics into everyday functions, blending human and robotic service in a unique way.
The world’s most unique Starbucks is housed in a building dedicated to testing robotic technologies.
Located on the second floor of Naver’s new office building in South Korea, this café features human baristas who take orders and make coffee, while service robots deliver it to employees throughout the building.
Named 1784 after the first Industrial Revolution, the building serves as a testing ground for various robotic technologies developed by Naver Labs, the company’s R&D arm.
Among the robots is “Rookie,” an autonomous service robot that handles coffee runs and other tasks.
Over 100 robots in the building deliver lunch boxes, convenience store orders, documents, and packages to more than 5,000 employees.
Robots navigate freely between eight basement levels and 28 floors using a special robot-only elevator, known as a “roboport,” and operate on a multi-robot intelligence system called ARC, described by Naver as their “collective brain.”
This system, powered by Naver’s cloud and 5G networks, employs collision avoidance, predictive coordination, and pathfinding algorithms for smooth operation.
The Seongnam office, Naver’s second headquarters, is touted as the world’s largest robotic testbed and provides a glimpse into the future of work. Founded in 1999, Naver launched South Korea’s first search engine and has since become one of the country’s largest corporations.
Naver Labs, established in 2017, focuses on autonomous systems and AI, and has developed several other robots including the dual-arm Ambidex, the server management system SeRo, and the drawing robot Arto-1.