Robot cat servers may deliver your next Philly meal

I was out holiday shopping last year when I stopped into a Smashburger at the Marple Crossroads Shopping Center in Delco and encountered something that made me as wide-eyed as a kid on Christmas morning — a robot cat server.

The white, obelisk-like robot with four shelves, two cat ears, and a computer screen face with expressive eyes and whiskers, glided through the restaurant playing ethereal music and emitting a soft blue light. It delivered burgers and fries tableside and, afterward, returned to its station near the counter.

Other customers barely batted an eye, but I couldn’t contain my wonder and started filming the robot. I wanted to scream “Why aren’t you all freaking out too?!? A robot cat just delivered your lunch!”

Over the last year, I’ve seen more people posting on social media and talking about encountering the robot — which is called a BellaBot — at Philly area restaurants like Tom’s Dim Sum, Chu Shang Spicy, and Nine Ting.

But perhaps nowhere is it more photographed than at popular Chinatown restaurant EMei, which boasts not one, but two robot servers.

“When they come out, people turn their heads and take pictures, and kids will follow them around,” said Dan Tsao, who co-owns EMei with wife, Tingting Wan. “Some people even request the robot to serve them.”

I wanted to know more about these robot cat servers. Are they a prescient foreboding of a robotic uprising to be feared and conquered, like HitchBOT, or are they useful tools that should be embraced as a wave of the future?

Tsao, who also publishes the Metro Chinese Weekly newspaper and runs its WeChat channel with more than 50,000 subscribers, helps connect local restaurateurs interested in the bots with Rutech, a Chicago-based company that distributes them in the U.S. He invited me to his restaurant recently to introduce me to his robots, show me how they work, and share his experiences.

“They can’t replace any human job, but they can serve as an assistant that allows us to cut redundancy,” Tsao said. “It’s also entertaining and fun.”

Designed and manufactured by Pudu Robotics, a Chinese-based tech company, the BellaBot wasintroduced in the U.S. in January 2020 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Tsao got his white BellaBot and a slightly smaller, yellow robot by Pudu, called a KettyBot (which does not have feline-like features) last October. At the restaurant, they’re known affectionately as “Little White” and “Little Yellow.”

The KettyBot — which weighs 84 pounds, is about three-and-a-half feet tall, and costs around $12,000 — is used primarily to run take-out orders from the packing station in the back of the restaurant to the hostess stand at the front. During busy times, this allows the food packer to continue fulfilling orders, instead of interrupting their work to walk the 90-step round-trip to the hostess stand and back.

“In the journey from here to the front, there are kids running and people walking in the aisles and we’ve had no issues,” Tsao said. “Nothing has fallen and nobody has been hit.”

The BellaBot — which weighs 121 pounds, stands at just over four feet tall, and costs about $16,000 — can go to any table in the restaurant and functions more as a server, helping deliver food to dine-in customers. It can go to multiple tables in a single journey and also works as a busser, bringing dirty dishes back to the kitchen.

The robots, which have been programmed with table numbers and specific locations within the restaurant, use visual and laser simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) to navigate around objects, people, and even each other.

They never get a table wrong, they never hit anyone, and they’ve never spilled anything, Tsao said.

But there was a curious incident when the BellaBot was initially programmed. The staff came in one morning and discovered it wasn’t at its station or anywhere they could see.

“They found the robot in the bathroom hallway,” Tsao said, laughing. “Did she have to pee in the middle of the night?”

Luckily, the BellaBot doesn’t require a bathroom or a litter box, but it is equipped with several interesting interactive features. Capable of being programmed in a variety of languages, the BellaBot can play music, sing “Happy Birthday,” and react to human touch.

Scratch its ears and BellaBot, which has more than a dozen facial expressions, will giggle and smile. But keep at it too long and BellaBot’s claws come out. Its ears turn red, its face gets frowny, and it reminds you it has work to do (like a real cat, it doesn’t have time to hang around all day being showered with affection by the likes of you).

The BellaBot is useful, adorable, and equipped with attitude, making it a good fit for Philly, but I know Philadelphians well enough to realize that if a BellaBot threatened a single human job, it could find itself sleeping at the bottom of the Schuylkill River or dismembered in a dark alley.

Before I could even ask, Tsao was quick to tell me the robots haven’t had an effect on the number of human staff at his restaurant. On the contrary, Tsao said his staffing levels are now 130% of what they were pre-pandemic.

He said the BellaBot cuts down on the miles of steps his servers walk in the restaurant every day and it aids in carrying heavy loads. When someone calls out sick, the BellaBot can be activated to shoulder the burden, Tsao said.

“It might help each server with 20% of their workload,” he said.

While I’ve written before about my concern for technological advancements that diminish or eliminate the need for human interactions, after having lunch at EMei twice recently, I didn’t find that to be the case.

On the first trip, a human waiter carried and delivered my food, and on the second, the BellaBot brought my food but a person still took it off the bot and presented it to me. And when I needed a to-go box for my Chongqing Spicy Chicken, it was a human, not a robot that I asked.

Still, before I left EMei I made sure to scratch the BellaBot’s ears until it got ornery, just to remind the robot — and myself — that humans are still in charge. For now.