A Robot Waiter Serves Diners at a Chinese Restaurant in Madison Heights | Eater Detroit

"Inside Noodle Topia in Madison Heights I watched a new server named Bella — a fairly short robot with protruding ears and the face of a cat — bring orders to tables and return to the kitchen like the other servers. She looks like a rolling bookshelf, with four trays, a touchscreen and an upward-facing infrared camera that helps her navigate; a staff member loads food onto a tray, enters a table number, and the robot takes off. Customers pulled out their phones to film as Bella chirpily announced, “Here I am!” and, “Hello, dear guest. Please pick up and don’t forget to hit confirm,” indicated which tray held the food, and either waited for a diner to press the confirm button or sensed the empty trays and returned on her own. Built by Shenzhen, China–based Pudu Robotics, Bella can be petted behind the ears to make her purr and will even display an exasperated expression if stroked too long; another robot, Hola, serves as a busboy. The two robots cost the restaurant about $800 a month to rent, a cost-effective help amid a statewide labor shortage (87 percent of Michigan operators say they don’t have enough staff), but they can’t fully replace humans — they don’t take orders, collect cash, or answer menu questions — and on a recent afternoon Bella delivered pork buns, lamb kebab and plastic cups of water but wasn’t used for other beverages or the restaurant’s famous hot bowls of long, handmade Chinese noodles because, as a colleague explained, “It might spill.”" - Monica Williams