NUPIAO
While other robot makers are obsessed with running, jumping, and chasing that almost-human look, Yingzhi Technology walked a completely different path—and it doesn’t even involve walking.
On June 30, Yingzhi unveiled its first humanoid restaurant robot, the X1, showing off live voice ordering, cocktail mixing, and food delivery right on stage. The plan gets even bigger: eventually, the X1 could morph into a mobile robot food cart, serving grilled sausages and snacks to customers on the go.
To dodge the creepy uncanny valley, the X1 has no face. Its twin 7-axis arms can handle about 3 to 4 kg and work together with a positioning accuracy of around ±1 mm, with repeatability around ±0.5 mm. Six-axis force sensors in the wrists let the robot feel weight and resistance, so it can grab cups, pick up ice, and pour drinks with the kind of consistency you’d expect from a pro bartender.
Oh, and it doesn’t have legs. Yingzhi gave the X1 a wheeled base instead of feet—and that was on purpose.
“Don’t make a humanoid just for the sake of it. My bottom line is no legs,” said Tang Mu, founder and CEO of Yingzhi, in an interview. It’s mostly about cost, but more importantly, coffee and cocktail bars are built around fixed counters. Bipedal legs aren’t just unnecessary—they can be a liability. “Without legs, even if the power cuts out suddenly, the robot stays upright and won’t smash your expensive equipment or finished drinks.”
Honestly, this isn’t Yingzhi’s first rodeo. Over the past few years, the company has deployed more than 1,000 coffee-making robots around the world, pouring over 4 million cups. You’ll find them working inside Xinhua Bookstores, the Hong Kong ICAC, and even underground stations in the UK.
But here’s the thing: those earlier machines were mostly robotic arms bolted to a workstation. Sure, they had AI interaction and multimodal recognition, but plenty of customers still thought they were just fancy vending machines.
“Before, I spent ages explaining, ‘This is a robot, not a vending machine.’ Now that we’ve made it humanoid, I don’t have to explain anymore,” Tang said. The human-like form just clicks with how people imagine a robot should look, and it blends way more naturally into a café or a bar. Watching a robot mix your drink and crack a joke becomes part of the experience—that emotional punch is something a vending machine can’t copy.
The robot’s new look is just the surface. The real story is a fundamental shift in how Yingzhi plans to make money: stop selling individual robot machines and start selling a whole turnkey restaurant operating system.
The backbone of this model is the freshly launched XOS robot operating system. It unifies perception, control, interaction, and operations across different robot shapes—so a coffee robot, an ice cream robot, and a humanoid robot all share the same brain. This “one brain, many bodies” approach paves the way for Yingzhi to expand into even more food categories and settings.
Tang let slip that the team is already working on a triple-arm collaboration setup, where one system orchestrates multiple arms to handle different steps at the same time, speeding up output even more.
But neither the hardware nor the OS is the final destination. Yingzhi is pulling together the robot hardware, XOS system, an AI store manager, a backend operations dashboard, and supply chain chops into one integrated package—shifting from “selling equipment” to “selling service,” giving partners a ready-to-replicate restaurant business formula.
“Sooner or later, robots will get cheaper,” Tang said during the interview. “If you only sell hardware, you’ll get dragged into a price war and your margins will shrink to nothing.” Yingzhi’s logic is to make sure the robot can “do the math” first—because proving that the machine can pay for itself and keep delivering value is a much tougher and more important benchmark than showing off fancy footwork.
