If coffee is your answer to early mornings or to afternoons that seem to just drag on and on, then you won’t find West Chester University short of options. There’s a Starbucks on the first floor of the FHG Library, a Saxbys across High Street from Main Hall and a food truck at the corner of University Ave. and Church St. serving Fenn’s Coffee.
What if you need that caffeine fix here and now? What if walking all the way from your dorm to the Academic Quad and waiting in line is just too much to ask? IBM might have a solution. They want drones to deliver it.
In August, IBM, creator of the current record holder for the world’s fastest supercomputer and former giant of the personal computer business, filed a patent for drone-delivered coffee. As they imagine it, you could order the coffee digitally through an app or similar means.
They’ve also thought up quite a few other means easier even than opening an app and ordering. Within an office or, say, a catering situation, a drone could hover from a distance and then respond to a predetermined hand signal. Like flagging down a waiter or waitress to refill your water glass, the drone would come to you with your beverage with just a wave.
IBM also patented the idea of the drone delivering coffee without being specifically asked via app, hand signal or otherwise. IBM would take biometrics from fitness trackers such as a Fitbit, data from your online calendar or even the drone’s assessment of your posture and body language to determine if you need a caffeinated kick in the pants. The drone would then fly down, carrying your presumably much needed drink.
The idea of a drone flying through the sky with a sloshing cup of hot liquid may not sit well with everyone. As this is a patent, not a completed project, IBM has proposed multiple ideas for how to best solve the issue of delivering scalding hot caffeine from the sky.
The most prominent within the patent’s illustrations is a Starbucks-esque coffee cup in a plastic bag. That bag is suspended from the drone via a string. Most of their other ideas also involve strings and how to cut or release that string once your coffee is in hand.
More comfortable for some is their idea to store the coffee within the drone, but that solution leads to its own bevy of problems, such as keeping the coffee hot but the drone cool.
All of this, however, is just a collection of ideas and conjecture. A company can patent something, but that doesn’t mean they have any intention of actually creating the proposed technology.
If drone delivery becomes considerably more popular, you might just see flying coffee cups and shorter lines at Starbucks. Alternatively, in a few years, this patent could just become a mostly forgotten anecdote. Until then, there’s still plenty of places to get your coffee on campus.
Tim Cochran is a second-year transfer student majoring in English. ✉ TC911038@wcupa.edu.