In a pilot service available in Shenzhen, users booking home cleaning through service apps such as 58.com are sent a professional cleaner accompanied by a robot. While the professional manages complex judgment calls, the robot carries out repetitive tasks, including wiping tables, collecting floor debris, tying trash bags, and helping fold bedsheets.
The robots are developed by X Square Robot, a Shenzhen-based embodied intelligence company founded in 2023. The firm partnered with household services platform 58.com to move the machines out of labs and into occupied apartments.
Yang Qian, chief operating officer at X Square, said the machines do not rely on pre-programmed scripts or remote control. Instead, the company’s end-to-end model enables them to understand tasks, plan multistep actions, and execute them autonomously.
“The service industry has extremely high complexity and non-standard characteristics, and the home environment is regarded as the ultimate benchmark for evaluating general robots,” Yang added.
The internet takes notice
The arrangement, which has only been running for a few months now, has already made its way into overseas tech accounts. It has especially attracted notice on X.
RoboHub (@XRoboHub), an account that tracks robotics trends, posted that ‘the future of home cleaning just landed in Shenzhen and it is walking right into your living room.’
CyberRobo, another account in the same space, pushed back against replacement narratives, stressing that nobody was losing a job and that the robots were only joining the crew.
The Humanoid Hub, another robotics-focused X account, highlighted a practical benefit: data from every apartment the robot cleans feeds back into the AI model, drawing from real homes rather than staged or controlled environments.
The Shenzhen engine
China has been pouring resources into the robotics space for a while now, and Shenzhen keeps landing as the city where things actually get deployed. Robot Valley in Shenzhen’s Nanshan district is where X Square keeps its office. The blocks around it are packed with firms along the supply chain, most of them shipping overseas.
Pudu Robotics is the easiest example. The firm has picked up a stack of international design awards, Germany’s Red Dot being among them. Its cat-shaped delivery robot found an unexpected second life on Polish social media.
Felix Zhang, who founded Pudu and runs it as chief executive, said foreign markets have accounted for more than 80% of company revenue for several years running. The commercial cleaning line has done particularly well across Europe, North America, and parts of Asia.
Qianhai is another district in Shenzhen building its own cluster, putting together what it calls the Embodied Intelligence Bay. Robotics company Manifold Tech, which works on spatial perception and 3D reconstruction, got off the ground there.
Its systems powered the acrobatic kung fu robots that performed alongside human martial artists at the 2026 China Media Group (CMG) Spring Festival Gala, China’s annual flagship Lunar New Year television broadcast, and the same tech now sells to buyers in Europe, Japan, and the United States.
A growing footprint
City officials and industry groups put the local count at more than 2,600 AI firms and over 70,000 enterprises along the broader robotics chain. Both clusters logged double-digit growth last year.
The robots keep showing up in public view. Singaporean daily, The Straits Times, posted a clip of one directing traffic on a Shenzhen street. Euronews reported on a robot-run volunteer service station at Qianhaishi Park in Shenzhen, where robots patrol the grounds, give visitors directions, and occasionally perform.
Guangdong, the province in which Shenzhen sits, is what’s powering most of this. Science & Tech news site Interesting Engineering described it as the country’s leading hub for the sector, citing the industrial ecosystem and the range of environments where the technology gets stress-tested.
Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive, recently co-authored a TIME magazine piece offering a straightforward assessment of the trend: This future is approaching fast, and a lot of it is being built in China.
Sources: PR Newswire, People’s Daily Online, Cnbayarea