At Your Service: Coffee Beans Recommendation From a Robot Assistant

With advances in the field of machine learning, service robots are envisioned to become more present. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this need. One such example would be coffee shops, which have become intrinsic to our everyday lives. Yet, serving an excellent cup of coffee is not trivial as a coffee blend typically comprises rich aromas, indulgent and unique flavours. Our work addresses this by proposing a computational model which recommends optimal coffee beans resulting from users' preferences. Given coffee properties (objective features), we apply different supervised learning techniques to predict coffee qualities (subjective features). We then consider an unsupervised learning method to analyse the relationship between coffee beans in the subjective feature space. Evaluated on a real coffee beans dataset based on digitised reviews, our results illustrate that the proposed computational model gives up to 92.7 percent recommendation accuracy for coffee prediction. From this, we propose how it can be deployed on a robot.