Sharpa Deploys North at a Shanghai Dairy Queen
North operates during normal retail hours at the Shanghai restaurant and serves paying customers without human teleoperation. Sharpa describes the installation as the first commercial restaurant deployment of a fully autonomous humanoid system that uses an unmodified human kitchen, without dedicated fixtures, custom conveyors or other specialised infrastructure.
The robot follows a sequence that begins by removing a paper cup from a sanitised stack. It positions a metal blending ring, dispenses soft-serve mix, adds three measured scoops of Oreo crumbs and operates the high-speed spindle mixer. At the end, North turns the filled cup upside down before passing it to the customer, meeting Dairy Queen’s global quality check for the thickness of the soft serve.
Sharpa equipped the wheeled, dual-arm machine with proprietary “Sharpa Wave” hands. Each hand has 22 articulated points and more than 1,000 tactile sensors distributed across its fingertips. The data are processed by CraftNet, a vision-tactile-language-action model that adjusts finger placement and gripping force 100 times a second.
According to Sharpa, tactile information controls 98% of the robot’s 55 operating phases. The sensors detect resistance from the paper cup, help counter vibrations produced by the blender and allow North to alter its grip as the cup’s balance changes during the inversion.
The first-generation system takes about six minutes to make a Blizzard. An experienced employee typically completes the same item in two to three minutes. The dessert is sold for 31 yuan, or about $4.40, the same price charged when it is prepared by a human worker.
Customer interest in the automated cup flip has led the restaurant to use pre-booking through WeChat mini-programs to organise daily servings. Sharpa executives said the initial unit is not yet profitable on a cost basis. They identified the ability to operate independently in an existing kitchen and complete a long food-preparation sequence without human handovers as the central technical milestone of the installation.
