Something truly awe-inspiring took place at a trade show in Shanghai this month (July 2025). Service robot pioneers KEENON ROBOTICS, whose products you may be familiar with through our exclusive European distribution, rocked up at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) to showcase its latest innovation.
This was no ordinary product launch. This was, quite rightly, billed as a world premiere, with all the hype and razzmatazz of a Hollywood blockbuster that term evokes. Because what KEENON unveiled at WAIC was not just a new robot that can navigate busy restaurant floors or multi-storey hotels to deliver meals and more independently. This was a new breakthrough in the very notion of a service robot. A walking, talking, bipedal humanoid robot built with service in mind.
By all accounts, XMAN-F1 was a smash hit with delegates at the show. And as you might expect, the WAIC attracts a knowledgeable crowd in the field of cutting-edge AI and robotics. What apparently impressed the crowds so much was the ability of this long-limbed, human-shaped robot to carry out tasks way beyond the usual shuttling back and forth associated with service robots to date. Demos included the robot mixing drinks to order and scooping buckets of popcorn.
So are we destined to see the XMAN-F1 take over from human staff in bars and cinema snack concessions? Will robots soon be flipping our burgers and making our sandwiches? Will the robots bringing meals to our table in fancy restaurants walk rather than roll, and be capable of wiping up spillages, pouring wine, and engaging in polite conversation?
The social barrier
The race to develop ‘humanoid’ robots (as opposed to intelligent machines capable of acting independently) has been hotting up for many years now and is based on the assumption (backed up by some sound science, as it happens) that people are more likely to respond positively to interactions with robots if they look and behave broadly human. In service settings, this level of social recognition between human and robot would be very beneficial. Robots need to contribute to a positive customer experience, after all.
There are other benefits. Human beings are, for example, very dextrous creatures with highly advanced fine motor skills – skills which allow us to manipulate tools so well, for example. If you want to design a machine that can perform a variety of tasks like scooping popcorn into a bucket and mixing drinks, the human form could well be the best template going.
On both of these fronts, it appears that the days when we’ll be getting served dinner by immaculately presented robots in tuxedos are still a way off. In making its presentation at WAIC, KEENON’s top brass stressed that they didn’t have an all-purpose service robot ready to go to market. What they wanted to demonstrate was the potential of embodied AI by showing how an agile humanoid could complete a still narrow range of tasks independently through multimodal interactions.
And just as AI, no matter how advanced the large language models are getting, is still a way off grasping the full nuance of human language in a truly convincing way, we’re even further off seeing embodied AI machines get to grips with the minefield that is human social interactions, body language and all. That, some argue, will be the true litmus test of whether service robots are ready to become more than mechanical assistants, and provide service in the full, responsive, interactive sense of the world.
What we do know is that it’s going to be fun watching how things develop over the next few years.