SLO County restaurant adds a new server — a cat-faced robot named BellaBot
A robot with a cute kitty face is delivering food to diners at a Morro Bay restaurant.
Panda Panda Chinese Restaurant, which opened in April at 810 Morro Bay Blvd., recently added a BellaBot food delivery robot to its staff. It is the second of its kind to be used at a San Luis Obispo County restaurant.
Restaurant co-owner Xiaohan Ding said that her mom and partner, Yanzhi Liu, saw a BellaBot elsewhere and decided it would make an entertaining and useful addition.
Manufactured by Chinese company Pudu Robotics, the interactive robot can guide customers to their seats, drop off orders and help clear tables, freeing up staffers for other tasks.
That’s essential at a restaurant like Panda Panda, which offers more than 90 menu items, including eight appetizers, seven soups, six chow mein dishes and six fried rice dishes.
“Featuring innovative bionic design language, cute modeling, multi-modal interaction and many other new functions, BellaBot provides users with an unprecedented food delivery robot experience,” Pudu Robotics said on its website.
How does robotic server work?
So how does BellaBot work?
Kitchen staffers load food and beverages on BellaBot’s trays, then program the robot to deliver the items to the appropriate table.
After the customer removes the food and drinks, the robot glides back into waiting position. Then, when diners are finished eating, they can summon BellaBot and load their empty dishes on its trays.
BellaBot, which stands a little more than 4 feet tall and weighs 121 pounds, is equipped with 3D sensors and a modular chassis so it can “stop at any angle and move away as soon as it encounters obstacles,” Pudu Robotics said.
The robot also responds to voice commands and reacts when customers pet it.
It’s capable of “dozens of exclusive original expressions” and can even sing “Happy Birthday,” the company said.
In addition to restaurants, BellaBots can be used by hospitals, supermarkets and offices, according to Pudu Robotics.
Ding and her mom paid about $20,000 for their BellaBot, about $9,000 less than the annual salary of a minimum-wage worker in California.
The purchase made sense “because of the difficulty in finding and keeping server staffers,” Ding said via text, noting that it’s getting more and more expensive to keep servers.
The restaurant has five to seven employees, depending on the day.
SLO sushi restaurant uses robot helper
Panda Panda Chinese Restaurant isn’t the first San Luis Obispo County eatery to acquire a robotic helper.
Yanagi Sushi in San Luis Obispo unveiled its BellaBot in July.
Since then, manager Crystal Cui said, the robot has been invaluable as a backup kitchen runner and busser.
“It’s been really good,” she said of BellaBot. “In the beginning, the customers were surprised, because they’d never seen one before.”
Now, she said, “Families bring children and grandchildren in to see Bella, and they love it, petting it and saying ‘I love you, Bella!’ ”
The bot, which can be programmed in several languages, does have some limitations, Cui said.
For instance, it can serve any food except soup, Cui said.
She said the the robot “doesn’t replace our servers, because only they can provide customer service.”
This story was originally published August 31, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
