Robots already at work

Humanoids are the demo. The robots earning money in Singapore today roll on wheels: tray robots in restaurants, scrubbers in malls and airports, couriers in hotel lifts, shelf carriers in warehouses, and arms bolted to factory floors. Pudu alone has shipped more than 130,000 units, and the five biggest commercial service robot makers are all Chinese. This chapter draws each class to scale, animates what it does, and follows the money and the repair ticket to the distributor who actually shows up.

The fleet at a glance

Pick a robot to jump to its drawing. Every drawing on this page is at one scale, 352 units to the metre, so the line-up below compares true sizes.

• Restaurant deliveryBellaBotPudu · Shenzhen1.29 m4 trays, 40 kg
• Restaurant deliveryDINERBOT T10Keenon · Shanghai1.40 m4 trays
• Floor scrubberCC1 ProPudu · Shenzhen0.70 m75 kg
• Floor scrubberPhantasGausium · Shanghaiabout 0.66 m4-in-1
• Hotel deliveryFlashBotPudu · Shenzhenabout 1.3 mrides lifts
• WarehouseShelf carrier AMRKiva lineage, Geek+, HAI0.3 m unitlifts a pod
• Industrial arm6-axis welderFanuc, Yaskawa, ABB, KUKA class1.4 m reach6 DoF
• Cobot armUR5e classUniversal Robots, Dobot, JAKA, AUBO, Elite0.85 m reach5 kg

Restaurant delivery robots

The tray robot is the most visible commercial robot in Asia because it works in public. It carries plates from the pass to a table number typed on a tablet, waits for a guest to lift the dish, and drives back. The job is simple enough that two Chinese makers have shipped more than 230,000 units between them, and hard enough that most venues still keep a human runner for the stairs, the spills and the split-level dining room.

Pudu BellaBot

Pudu is the company to understand first because its published terms define how the whole channel works. Founded in Shenzhen in 2016, it passed 100,000 cumulative units in June 2025 and 130,000 by mid-2026 vendor claim, sells more than 80% of its output outside China vendor claim, and now earns more than 70% of revenue from cleaning robots rather than trays vendor claim. It raised about US$150M in April 2026 at a valuation above US$1.5B verified and told Nikkei in June 2026 that it is preparing a Hong Kong listing contested: one 36Kr round-up already calls it listed, and no prospectus was on HKEX at the time of writing. Absolute revenue is not public.

Keenon DINERBOT T10

Keenon started in Shanghai in 2010, six years before Pudu, and took the restaurant category first: it supplied Haidilao's first wave of robot waiters in 2018 unverified and held 40.4% of global food delivery robot shipments in 2024, 29.8% of all delivery robots and 22.7% of commercial service robots overall IDC via Keenon. Its DINERBOT line runs from the compact T8 through the T9 high-load unit to the T10 flagship with a marketing screen and the new narrow-aisle T11; the BUTLERBOT W3 does hotels, the KLEENBOT C-series does floors, and the XMAN humanoids appeared at WAIC in July 2026 making drinks. Funding stopped at a US$200M Series D from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in 2021 verified; a Hong Kong IPO of about US$200M was reported as under consideration in January 2026 unverified.

Keenon's Singapore presence is the murkiest of the three big makers. A trade blog names Truly Robotics as its partner; Truly's own site calls itself SoftBank Robotics' master distributor and lists no Keenon model contested. What is verifiable is the grant page at keenonrobot.sg: Keenon robots were on the Productivity Solutions Grant list at up to 50% of cost, capped at S$30,000 per company a year and S$15,500 per robot, for F&B firms with at least 30% local shareholding verified. That scheme closes on 29 September 2026 and folds into EDGE, covered below.

Commercial cleaning robots

Cleaning is where the money moved. Pudu's revenue mix flipped from trays to scrubbers, Gausium built a whole company on floors, and the analysts agree that commercial cleaning robot shipments grew between 50% and 84% in 2025 even while they disagree on the count: IDC says 58,000 units and US$760M, Counterpoint says more than 50,000 units and more than US$400M contested. Both put penetration below 10% of commercial cleaning, against about US$50B of cleaning services demand in 2026 estimate.

Pudu CC1 Pro

Gausium Phantas

Gausium, formerly Gaussian Robotics, is the pure-play cleaning company: Phantas for small spaces, Scrubber 50 and 75 for malls, Omnie with 3D LiDAR for airports and transit, Beetle and Vacuum 40 for carpets. It claims 9,400+ customers in 70+ countries verified, IDC's No. 1 position for 2025 vendor-quoted IDC, and robots at 25+ international airports including Changi unverified. Its Singapore arm, Gaussian Robotics Singapore, is a subsidiary of the facilities-tech firm SIMPPLE verified, and the cleaning contractor Conrad Maintenance Services runs Phantas and Scrubber 50 units for JustCo, WeWork and Schneider Electric verified. A 2022 company interview gave the after-sales rule "4-2-1": reply within 4 hours for complex faults, 2 for normal, 1 for severe, with 40% of problems solved remotely and after-sales staff at 13% of headcount 2022 claim. Warranty on Phantas is 1 year from receipt and excludes collisions, burns and ingress of water, oil or sand verified.

What actually breaks on a wheeled robot

No maker publishes failure rates. What they publish are manuals, and the manuals are a confession. The table collects every chore and fault the Pudu and Gausium documents name; the pattern is consumables and hygiene, plus getting lost. Hardware repair is a module swap, and the module comes from the maker.

The reliability chapter turns this into service models. The point here is that a Singapore venue's typical robot problem is a S$5 rubber blade or a strand of hair, and the person who can fix it is whoever is on site at 21:30 on a Saturday.

Why the maths works in Singapore

Robots sell into Singapore cleaning and food service because the wage floors are written down and rise every July. The Progressive Wage Model sets the minimum basic monthly wage for outsourced cleaners; from 1 July 2026 a general indoor cleaner must be paid S$2,080, a machine operator S$2,700, and the floors climb about S$170 a year through 2028 verified. Food services joined on 1 July 2026 with a S$2,320 floor for a full-service waiter, rising to S$2,600 by 2028 verified, covering more than 53,000 workers. Set that against a tray robot on rent.

The other cleaning names

Hotel and building delivery

The hotel delivery robot is the tray robot's harder sibling. It carries a locked compartment instead of open trays, so it needs a door mechanism, and it works across floors, so it needs to call a lift and ride it alone. That second requirement makes the building, rather than the robot, the hard part of the sale.

Lift integration, 梯控 tīkòng, is a contract between the robot maker, the lift maker and the building owner, and Singapore has just standardised it: SS 713:2025 covers robot-to-infrastructure communication with lifts and doors, elevated from a technical reference verified. The Singapore company QuikBot Technologies started as a building delivery robot firm and pivoted to selling exactly this layer as "trust infrastructure": a cryptographic identity for each robot, permission checks against the building owner's policy, a full audit trail of every robot action, and embedded insurance with EFGH. In September 2026 it signed agreements with Mitsubishi Elevator Singapore and Hitachi High-Tech Singapore and lists South Beach, Mapletree Business City and Punggol Digital District as live sites verified. Keenon's BUTLERBOT W3 (four lockable compartments) and Otsaw's TransCar, a 200 kg hospital meal-trolley mover used at SGH and KKH vendor claim, are the other lift-riding robots in Singapore buildings.

Warehouse and factory-floor robots

Logistics is the biggest professional service robot category by far: 102,900 transport and logistics robots sold in 2024, up 14%, and robot-as-a-service fleets in the category growing 42% a year IFR. Amazon reportedly passed one million robots in mid-2025 unverified. The archetype is the low goods-to-person unit that slides under a shelf, lifts it and carries it to a picker.

Pudu is now in this market too. Its T150 light-payload factory AMR launched on 9 January 2026 in China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea and Turkey in the same week and sold 1,000+ units in four months, with a stated service life of up to five years vendor claim; the T300 tote AMR (300 kg, 60 cm minimum aisle) sold 4,000+ in its first year and the MP2000 pallet mover carries 2,000 kg on 3D LiDAR plus depth cameras vendor claim. Singapore's own contribution is orchestration: Botsync's SyncOS runs vendor-agnostic AMR fleets for Ford, Caterpillar, Nestlé and Coca-Cola, reported 230% revenue growth and more than a million production trips in 2025, and took a Series A extension from SGInnovate in January 2026 verified. Sesto Robotics builds industrial AMRs and raised US$5.7M in 2022 old. Locus, Geek+, HAI and AutoStore appear in the research files by name only, with no figures, so this page makes no claims about their size.

Industrial arms and cobots

Arms are the oldest robot business and still the biggest by value. More than 600,000 industrial robots were installed in 2025, up 11%, and 5 million are operating, double the stock of seven years earlier IFR, 24 Sep 2026. China installed 354,000 of them, 59% of the world, and Chinese brands took 55% of China's installs for the first time IFR. Singapore has the second highest robot density on earth, 818 robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers against South Korea's 1,220 and a global average of 132 IFR, Apr 2026.

Six-axis industrial arm

Two trade facts change who you buy an arm from in Southeast Asia. US tariffs on a Chinese industrial robot now stack to about 40% (2.5% base, 25% Section 301 since 2018, 12.5% more from 24 July 2026) with a Section 232 action pending estimate, which pushes Chinese arm makers toward markets like yours. And the service tail is where the incumbents earn: ABB describes it as recurring, Fanuc treats it as an annuity, and none of them splits it out, which is itself a signal.

Collaborative arm

Where robots already work in Singapore

No agency publishes a count of service robots in Singapore, and no vendor gives a Singapore number absence verified. What exists is a list of named sites from vendor pages, press and tenders, drawn here as a schematic. Do not read distances off it.

Who sells, rents and fixes them

In Southeast Asia the maker is in Shenzhen or Shanghai and the person who arrives with a screwdriver works for a distributor. Pudu's own support page sets the rule for the whole channel: during warranty, "distributors provide maintenance services to end-users, and Pudu Robotics provides free maintenance spare parts and technical support"; after warranty, "distributors pay for the maintenance of spare parts" verified. The same page voids the warranty for "unauthorized modification, disassembly, shell opening, and maintenance under unofficial guidance" verified, and Unitree and Gausium publish the same clause. Whoever holds the distributor or authorised service contract owns the in-warranty repair market outright.

Distributors and service partners by country

Prices, rent, warranty and grants

An illustration, with the arithmetic labelled as such: a S$20,000 cleaning robot bought by an SME at the 70% EDGE ceiling would draw S$14,000 of grant, and the S$100,000 annual cap would cover about seven such robots a year per company illustrative. Whether robots keep their pre-approved status under EDGE is not stated on the EnterpriseSG page yet. Until it is, the grant is the largest single unknown in a Singapore robot quote.

Singapore's own robot companies

Two absences matter more than any row above. No multi-brand commercial service robot repair firm turned up in Singapore, Malaysia or Indonesia; the consumer robot-vacuum shops exist, the commercial ones do not none found. And the only multi-brand repair network in the research is JD.com's in China: eight regional hubs, growing from dozens to more than 100 technicians in 2026, born because defective Unitree robots had to be shipped whole to Hangzhou press. Chinese commentary on the domestic market says the same thing in one line: repair skills are scarce, after-sales is poor, return cycles are long and repair is expensive (售后服务不到位、返修周期长、维修成本高) summary.

A day in the life of a restaurant robot

Put the parts together and follow one BellaBot through a Saturday at a hotpot restaurant in a mall. Every stop on the timeline is a documented fault or chore from the manuals above.

Terms in this chapter