AGIBOT livestreams six G2 humanoids on 24-hour store shift

Six G2 humanoid robots stocked shelves, prepared coffee and hot food, greeted customers and cleared rubbish inside a working convenience store for 24 hours on November 2 to 3, in a livestream Chinese robotics firm AGIBOT titled "Robots Never Clock Out." Interesting Engineering reported the broadcast was split into four operating periods: the lunch rush, evening rush, late-night duty, and breakfast preparation.

The duration of the stream is the headline. Whether the robots themselves ran that long is a separate question the company does not answer. "The announced 24-hour duration refers to the livestream and does not establish that each robot operates continuously without charging, maintenance, or human assistance," the article notes.

The promotional material, Interesting Engineering adds, "does not specify a complete intervention policy or a scoring system for measuring task success." The outlet lays out the measures a serious evaluator would want: "number of tasks completed, time required for individual activities, frequency of human intervention, and ability to recover from unsuccessful attempts." AGIBOT published none of them alongside the stream.

The challenge followed AGIBOT's AI Day announcements, which the article says included new AI models, the G2 Max robot, and a proposed "Worken" measure of productive robot work. It lands during a thick run of Chinese robotics coverage on our radar, with 296 China AI stories tracked in the last 90 days, including Xpeng open-sourcing its GroundingPI model the same day.