Robots replace waiters in China restaurant

SHANGHAI: The little robotic waiter wheels up to the table, raises its glass lid to reveal a steaming plate of local Shanghaistyle crayfish and announces in low, mechanical tones: “Enjoy your meal.”

The futuristic concept is the latest initiative in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s push to modernise service and retail.

Raising efficiency and lowering labour costs are the objectives at Alibaba’s “Robot.He” diners, where waiters have been replaced by robots about the size of microwave ovens, which roll around on table-high runways.

“In Shanghai, a waiter costs up to 10,000 yuan (RM5,976) per month. That’s hundreds of thousands in cost every year. And two shifts of people are needed,” said Cao Haitao, the Alibaba product manager who developed the concept.

“But we don’t need two shifts for robots and they are on duty every day.”

The diners are attached to Alibaba’s new Hema chain of semiautomated supermarkets, where grocery shoppers fill their “carts” on a mobile app and have the merchandise brought to them at checkout via conveyor tracks on the ceiling, or delivered straight to their homes.

At Robot.He, customers book tables and order entrées via apps, and the diner’s novelty often draws long queues.

The restaurant said automation kept costs down, an additional lure for 20-year-old customer Ma Shenpeng, who comes once a week.

“Normally for two to three people, a meal costs about 300 to 400 yuan. But here, a table full of food is just over 100 yuan,” he said.

Wang Hesheng, a robotics professor at Jiaotong University here, said the cost of robots remains too high for widespread consumer use.