aims to automate almost everything

For years, when we talked about robots serving people, Japan almost always appeared in the foreground. Now the focus has shifted. The race to bring robotics and artificial intelligence to everyday life has accelerated, and China has just put a striking proposal on the table: a hotel where reception, delivery, cleaning or surveillance are left in the hands of machines. They assure that it will be the first of its kind in the world.

The signature. Shenzhen Culture and Tourism and Pudu Robotics, a Chinese company specializing in commercial service robots, announced on May 31 an agreement to build this hotel on the western artificial island of the Shenzhen-Zhongshan link. The two parties present it as an establishment where the machines will not only be there for a specific demonstration, but to cover real day-to-day tasks.

The place is not coincidental. The hotel is projected on the western artificial island of the Shenzhen-Zhongshan link, a piece built in the waters of Lingdingyang within an infrastructure of about 24 kilometers. The context helps understand the choice. This city, today converted into a huge technology center, had been just a few decades before a small fishing town north of Hong Kong. The island officially opened to the public on December 29, 2025 after a test phase with almost 10,000 visitors.

The promise. The project wants to cover the most visible tasks and also some of the ones that we normally don’t see as much. According to official information, the robots would be in charge of receiving guests, guiding them with luggage, bringing food, serving rooms, cleaning, security patrols and accompanying or interacting with visitors. Pudu completes the picture with more catalog examples: machines capable of transporting heavy loads or coordinating services from automated points.

The calendar. The company places the first visible step at the end of this year, with a test that would open some rooms and robotic services to the first guests. Then would come the rollout in phases, with the goal that the hotel can receive visitors at the beginning of 2027. It is an ambitious roadmap, but we are still at that delicate point in which the announced deadlines must become real operations.

The difference they want to make. The most relevant technical point is not in the number of robots, but in how they are organized. Pudu maintains that its system allows different types of machines to operate on the same intelligent basis, with PuduFM 1.0 and PuduAgent as proper names for that architecture. The promise is that there are no individual pieces solving isolated problems, but rather a common layer capable of coordinating the service.

The Japanese mirror. The idea of ​​a hotel staffed by robots is not born from scratch. Guinness World Records recognizes to the Henn-na Hotel Nagasakiopened on July 17, 2015 inside the Huis Ten Bosch park, as the first hotel staffed by robots, albeit with some human helpers. There were humanoids at the reception, an industrial robot to sort luggage, machines for domestic tasks and even a robotic dinosaur to serve guests in English. The problem came later: Business Insider picked up in 2019 that the hotel reduced more than half of its robotic workforce after not reducing costs or workload.

Images | Pudu Robotics

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