By Emily Wang
Beijing cleaner Lin Meiqiong had her job a little easier the day she was paired with a tough new colleague – a tall, wheeled robot with AI grooming capabilities.
The 56-year-old and her white and silver partner, equipped with cameras and two mechanical claws, are part of a new human-robot cleaning service offered by Chinese home help platform 58.com.
It’s a small step toward a future championed by tech evangelists in which robots increasingly take over manual work from humans — though for now, such services are mostly a data-gathering exercise for companies and a novelty for curious customers.
“It’s definitely different,” Lin told AFP between cleaning the kitchen and wiping the windows.
“I had to do everything myself,” she said. “It has reduced the workload a bit.”
The cleaning service, a collaboration between 58.com and Chinese robotics company X Square, costs 149 yuan (US$22) for three hours and is available in Beijing and tech hub Shenzhen.
Helped to enter the apartment by an X Square engineer, the AI-powered Quanta X1 Pro robot uses its cameras to identify areas it can create.
As Lin swept the floor on her knees, she picked up trash and folded clothes scattered across a couch.
Grabbing a pair of dark gray trousers, he lifted his upper body to stretch the taut fabric, before stretching and arranging it into neat halves.
The process took several minutes and resembled a child learning to fold clothes for the first time.
Future iterations of the robot will respond to voice commands and even be able to chat, said the engineer, Hu Bowen.
“Better than a lab”
About 200 families have booked the service since it was introduced in March.
Tan Pei, who works in advertising and booked the robot to clean her apartment in Beijing, said she chose the service because she was interested in “seeing what it could do”.
“Even though it’s not that perfect, there are still parts of it that surprised me, like folding a pair of pants ‘well enough,'” she said.
China’s robots have wowed audiences with fluid dances and martial arts performances on stage, but their application and performance in real-life environments remain limited.
For companies like X Square, the logic of launching an imperfect service lies in collecting data for so-called embodied artificial intelligence.
Unlike large language models trained on large amounts of online content, bots lack comparable real-world datasets.
“We don’t have a robotic internet yet,” Christoforos Mavrogiannis of the University of Michigan told AFP.
“It’s much more informative to put the robot out there and study what happens than to stay in the lab forever.”
X Square engineer Hu said he sends his robots to work in a “completely unfamiliar environment.”
“This is very challenging, but this unknown data is also very useful for improving the robot.”
While investment in embodied artificial intelligence is booming, similar trials in China include robots directing traffic in cities like Hangzhou or working on factory floors.
On the home assistance front, the GigaAI firm also plans to deploy 100 humanoid robots to households in central Wuhan this fall for free home service trials.
Investors have poured more than 57.7 billion yuan (US$8.5 billion) into China’s embodied artificial intelligence industry so far this year, already surpassing the total for last year as a whole, according to business database ITjuzi.
‘Very elementary stage’
But a host of obstacles stand in the way of widespread deployment.
As the Quanta X1 Pro’s laundry folding showed, robots still can’t match human dexterity.
“Even though many companies are working on building better hands and building autonomy for the hands, we don’t have that yet,” said Mavrogiannis of the University of Michigan.
There are numerous regulatory issues even after the fitness is there.
Privacy will become a major issue as bots gain access to large amounts of personal data.
“We don’t know where that data is going, where it is … who is looking at that information,” said Valeria Alessandra Macalupu Chira from the Queensland University of Technology.
The safety of customers and their homes is another unresolved issue.
“I think we are still at a very basic stage,” said Yang Jianfei of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
Robots currently require human supervision that can activate emergency stop functions, he noted, and no industry-wide safety standards are yet recognized.
Experts agree that widespread adoption seems a long way off.
Asked if she thought robots would revolutionize her industry, cleaner Lin didn’t seem too concerned.
“Compared to humans, it’s definitely not quite there yet,” she said. “After all, it’s a robot.”
