German high school students invent 'coffee shooting machine'

Three Essen students won a recent science competition in their region and took home another prize nationally. This one-off engineering project may look neat, but probably won't impact the coffee industry anytime soon.

Imagine not having to stand up to get a refill of coffee because you have an intelligent coffee machine that knows where your empty cup is and shoots the coffee right into your cup. Sounds impossible?

Three German high school students have recently designed a machine designed to do exactly that. With their invention, these students recently took part in the regional level of the "Jugend forscht," or "Youth Research" competition in which high school students present their scientific inventions or discoveries.

The three students made their bizarre machine at their Physics and Engineering project group at the Essen-Werden High School in Essen, in western Germany.

This coffee-shooting contraption is built onto a roughly one-and-a-half meter by one-and-a-half meter platform. There's a simple frame built above the surface, with a camera mounted directly above, pointing down. On one of the legs of the frame, raised about a meter above, sits the camera and a nozzle. Once set up, the camera detects the precise location of the cup, and fires.

Lino Thomas and Lukas Borrmann, two of the minds behind the coffee shooting machine

Although the machine can not make coffee, it can shoot already prepared coffee into a cup that is placed at any given distance.

"We first have to mark a table, then put a cup on it," explained Lino Thomas, one of the students behind the project. "A camera placed above the cup recognizes the location of the cup through the marks and then calculates how the coffee shooting nozzle has to shoot the coffee so that it gets into the cup."

"We had first thought of throwing balls or shooting off something but we thought that would be too brutal," he told Deutsche Welle. "Then we noticed that our teacher is a coffee addict and so shooting plus coffee - shooting coffee, that is how we came up with the idea and implemented it."

A role for each student

Each of the three students worked on a different aspect of the device.

Lino Thomas worked on the mechanics and electronics - making sure the nozzles received accurate signals and fired properly. Another classmate, Lukas Borrmann, worked on the computer program that calculates the distance to the cup. His classmate, Nina Reinhardt, developed the mathematical formulas that were required for the calculation of the angle and the distance of the cup and she also worked on the structure of the machine.

The three students won last month's regional competition and even received a special prize at the national competition in the "Engineering" category.

But of course, like every other device, there are limitations to this coffee shooting machine.

"At the moment all cups have to be of the same size," Rheinhardt explained. "That is a limitation. They should also not have the same color as the table because when the cups disappear on the table we can't recognize them and shoot."

Although the students have drawn a lot of attention because of their machine, they are not planning to develop it further for commercial use.

No likely future in the coffee industry

For now, it remains as a demonstration device at their school. However, they think that it could be developed into something with more useful functions than shooting coffee.

Lino Thomas was in charge of making sure that the nozzles received accurate signals

Rheinhardt added that the concept could be re-purposed as a fire-extinguishing system. Once upgraded, it would contain heat sensors, and then could direct a stream of water as needed.

Even experts of coffee and coffee machines think that the coffee shooting machine is a nice invention but not one that would have likely commercial viability.

Andreas Wessel-Ellermann, who runs a coffee roastery in Hamburg, speculated that this invention might be a neat addition for any coffee-serious home.

"I can't imagine the machine being used in the food service industry because there you will probably have more than one person sitting at a table and then the machine won't know which cup to fill," Wessel-Ellermann told Deutsche Welle. "There's also the issue of liability incase the machine makes a mistake or someone walks directly into that jet of coffee."

Still, even though the machine is a one-off, these students may have a bright engineering future ahead of them. The trio are set to graduate this summer and have already begun working on their university applications for this coming fall.

Author: Elizabeth Shoo / cjf
Editor: Stuart Tiffen

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15134706,00.html