With somersaults, nunchucks, China’s humanoid robots thrill at CNY show – but can they make coffee?

BEIJING/SHENZHEN – At the 2025 Spring Festival Gala, they were doing synchronised dancing.

By the 2026 edition on Feb 16, the humanoid robots were back, swinging nunchucks, somersaulting and executing drunken boxing moves – seemingly trying to outdo the human performers they shared the stage with.

At the country’s biggest television show of the year watched by hundreds of millions, robots by China’s leading humanoid maker Unitree wowed audiences with these high-difficulty moves and had the state media hailing the advancements made in just one year.

While impressing many, a bigger test for China’s robot-makers is not whether their robots can perform gravity-defying moves, but whether they can deliver on more mundane functions, such as serving coffee in stores or doing household chores at homes.

The gala, on the eve of Chinese New Year, also known as the Spring Festival in China, offered a glimpse of progress in that direction, which is key to the robots’ commercial viability.

Competition among the robot-makers is heating up, fuelled by a state-directed push to make China a powerhouse in robotics, even before the technology is fully mature.

A silvery white robot by Beijing Galbot starred in a short film at the gala, demonstrating the ability to fold a T-shirt, pick up and skewer a sausage, and grab a bottle off a shelf.

The aim was to show that the robots are ready to do real work, and to enter homes and shopping streets in pursuit of mass-market consumers.

The flagship Galbot G1 is marketed as just good for industrial manufacturing – it has already been deployed in car factories – but it also has ambitions to be able to do cleaning at home, attend to patients in hospitals and serve customers in shops.

But it is retailing online for a steep 699,999 yuan (S$128,600), suggesting that it is, for now, mainly for industry users, rather than home owners seeking robot nannies.

Trials have sprouted across the country to show that it is ready to face the public. Since 2025, Galbot has set up more than 100 robot-manned “convenience stores” to demonstrate and refine the droids’ autonomous functioning as shopkeepers.

At these stores, customers can order items such as potato chips and drinks from a touchscreen menu and pay by scanning a QR code. But the robot’s abilities remain basic: It grabs the order from one of the store’s racks, and sets it down on the counter.

The road ahead is expected to be bumpy, with a key difficulty being a

lack of data to train the robots

on functions that might, for now, still be much more readily done by humans.

At Heshenghui, a popular shopping mall in Beijing, a pop-up cafe manned by a humanoid robot is able to only dispense hot beverages from a coffee machine.

The Straits Times ordered an iced latte but the ice cubes were added by a human assistant, who was also the one who loaded the cups into an adjacent machine. The staff member told ST that a human has to be around to address any hiccups, and the robot cannot yet fully function autonomously.

The robot, which presses buttons on the coffee machine and swivels in place to bring the cup to the customer, is from Zhipingfang, a Shenzhen-headquartered firm founded in 2023.

The company describes itself as being devoted to the popularisation of general intelligence robots, so that they “can be used like smart cars and phones by everyone”.

Along Wangfujing shopping street in Beijing, at a convenience store run by a Galbot G1, it is able to retrieve items that customers buy from a nearby shelf, but a separate robotic arm that made coffee was down when ST visited on Feb 19.

China currently leads the global adoption of humanoid robots, accounting for more than 80 per cent of some 16,000 installations worldwide in 2025, according to technology research firm Counterpoint Research. Its firms also sold the lion’s share of these droids – the top four were all Chinese, with the US’ Tesla in fifth place.

Over the past year, China’s humanoids have been put to work in factories on tasks like carrying boxes and sorting items, and have also taken on more public-facing roles such as store assistants and “robo-cops” that patrol the streets and direct traffic.

“But most of these are still trials and early-stage deployment,” said Mr Su Lian Jye, a chief analyst at tech research firm Omdia.

The bulk of China’s humanoid deployments are for research, education and entertainment purposes, as well as in “data farms” used to generate training data for other robots, he said.

The hope is that other than performing martial arts or dances, humanoid robots can eventually progress to doing “real work” such as folding clothes and making coffee. In other words, they can move from specific, niche applications to general-use situations, which are far more difficult to execute.

One obstacle to this progression is a shortage of data to help the robots understand and adapt to any given environment they are placed in, said Mr Su. In the absence of this, they will need “a lot of hand-holding, a lot of fine-tuning” each time they encounter a new scenario, he added.

So for now,

humanoid robots still have some way to go

before becoming a staple in homes, or even productive shopkeepers.

At Heshenghui, the Beijing shopping mall, a passer-by who was browsing the pop-up store’s coffee menu was less than impressed with the robot’s capabilities.

The robot’s movement was “not very smooth”, said Mr Tian, 47, who works in the pharmaceutical industry and declined to give his full name. He added that it would be “smarter” if the robot could grind coffee beans or blend different flavours.

While such robots may eventually become useful for elderly people who have lost some daily living functions, a middle-aged person like him who is still able-bodied will not be attracted to buy one, he said.

“I think humanoid robots may find more success in real-life applications in providing emotional interactions, especially for the elderly, since it’s easier for them to fulfil such emotional needs rather than achieve physical capabilities,” he said.

At a “robot 6S store” in Shenzhen over the Chinese New Year holidays, a handful of visitors crowded around a humanoid billed as a housekeeper while a staff member explained how it could do chores such as folding clothing and blankets.

“Can’t it do cooking yet?” retiree Yin Xiaofei, 60, wanted to know. The answer was no, as the robot could not come into contact with water, the staff member said.

“It’s too simple,” Ms Yin said of the droid’s limited repertoire while baulking at the 190,350 yuan price tag. “Even if they can’t be as nimble as humans, they should at least come close.”