Pudu Robotics Robotics

Employees had to restrain a dancing humanoid robot after it went wild at a California restaurant | TechCrunch

From what we can see from the video, at least three employees struggled to restrain the robot as it flung its arms around. One Haidilao employee seems to be looking at her phone, perhaps in an attempt to toggle something on an app controlling the robot. It’s possible the robot — which appears to be an AgiBot X2 robot, which was featured at the CES conference in January — has a kill switch, but the staff might not have known how to operate it. [...] “In this case, the robot was brought closer to a dining table at a guest’s request, which is not its typical operating setting,” the Chinese chain of hot pot restaurants told NBC News in a statement. “The limited space affected its movement during the performance.” AgiBot did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Haidilao has experimented with a “smart restaurant” in Beijing, which used robotic servers and broth mixing machines. It seems that this Haidilao restaurant was just using this robot for entertainment purposes, but things got out of hand when it danced a little too close to customers. [...] Many startups are working on bringing robots to the food service industry, like Shin Starr, which is working on making fully autonomous kitchens. Pudu Robotics’ BellaBot, a cutesy, cat-like robot, can direct customers to their seats and bring out their food when it’s done. Maybe that’s safer than humanoid robots, for now at least — the BellaBot does not have any limbs. Topics When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Amanda Silberling Senior Writer