Chinese company Dobot has developed collaborative robots to help retailers handle tasks such as making coffee, cocktails, ice cream, noodles, fried chicken and even physical therapy.

The Nova 2 and the Nova 5 are the first two models in the series with payloads of 2 and 5kg, respectively, for handling retail and physiotherapy tasks. They can replace workers to help reduce operating expenses and decrease direct human contacts during pandemics.

To meet the needs of retail branding, the company says the series contrasts the rigid design philosophy of industrial robots and offers colour customisation to fit into retail stores for better customer experiences. The series is also more compact than comparable industrial robots and can fit into one metre square of space.

Taking into consideration that most retail stores do not have full time engineers on staff, the series is designed to be easy to use. With drag to teach and graphical user interface, a user can programme a Nova without coding knowledge. Setting up a Nova takes around ten minutes.

Retail sector robots can have frequent interaction with people, making safety a top priority. Multiple safety features intelligently sense human movement, and it stops operation in 0.01 seconds upon collision detection. In case of power outage, they automatically freeze in position to ensure safety of others.

Dobot says the robots open the door of automation for the retail and service sectors.

“Robot adoption will expand beyond production floors of factories and into our daily lives,” said a company statement. “Collaborations and interactions between humans and machines will only increase.”

Dobot is a subsidiary of Yuejiang Technology, founded in 2015 and based in Shenzhen, China.