A robotic hand picks up a calligraphy brush, dips it in ink, and then writes the Chinese character "fu," meaning good fortune, on a square piece of red paper. The act captivates onlookers.
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Chinese robots like these are no longer just entertainment at events. They're increasingly being used to perform real jobs, and a whole new industry is emerging to teach them how to do it.
At the China International Fair for Trade in Services (CIFTIS), which concluded in Beijing, the Galbot G1 robot was on duty in an unmanned convenience pod. The robot previously went viral after it was shown folding clothes in a video clip for this year's Spring Festival Gala, which was broadcast globally.
Such pods are already operating in various locations, including Beijing's Summer Palace, a former imperial garden, where each pod is expected to serve more than 1,000 visitors per day. The first such outlet outside mainland China opened in Hong Kong.
Robots are also being used in a variety of other tasks. At the "unmanned post office" booth, a robot stamps postcards, drops them into mailboxes, and then retrieves toys from mystery boxes for customers.
A few meters away, a pancake-making robot flips crepes to order, while a coffee-making robot pours latte art into a freshly made cup of coffee.
"We have coffee-making robots on campus, but these robots are more advanced," said Olga, a visitor and a professor from Belarus at Beijing Foreign Studies University.
Making latte art requires a significant amount of effort for humans, he added, but robots do it with ease.
Despite all these novelties, there is still a wide gap between demonstration and implementation, namely training.
"Humanoid robot shipments in China's domestic market reached 23,000 units in the first half (H1) of this year, but less than 5 percent of them have been working stably on real production lines," said Zhu Kai, head of the Shijingshan Embodied Intelligence Training Center.
A production line is far more complex than a stage. "High-quality, multimodal, real-world robot data suitable for industrial training doesn't even reach 1 percent of the actual demand," Zhu said. This shortage, he added, is a major obstacle to moving robots "from just performing to actually working."
Efforts to bridge that gap begin at a "vocational school" for robots. The training center, located not far from the CIFTIS exhibition site in Shougang Park, is where much of that "homework" is done.
Nearly 270 robots work there at full capacity to perform household tasks, maintenance exercises, and factory tasks such as automatically placing circuit boards onto production lines, resulting in nearly 20 million high-quality data entries annually.
The "school" was open to visitors throughout the exhibition. The training there was applied to human-like movements. Rows of robots practiced picking up and putting down boxes or ironing trousers, each following the movements demonstrated by a human mentor.
These mentors now have official titles. On the opening day of the expo, September 9, 2026, China officially recognized a new profession: embodied intelligence robot application technician, encompassing two new areas of expertise: robot data collector and robot trainer.
The equipment has also changed. Previously, data collectors controlled the machines from fixed laboratory consoles. However, with the installation of new recording devices, they can now easily enter real-world work scenarios, recording human hand movement activity as they work.
At one booth, virtual reality (VR) device manufacturer NOLO showcased EgoCapture, a head-mounted device that records real-time human movement in 360-degree angles.
When used during trail running, the device will generate the precise data the robot needs to predict turns during long-distance runs. Clients can purchase this service instead of purchasing a complete set of equipment.
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