Singapore fetches smart tourism through China's AI robot dogs

SINGAPORE — As evening falls, crowds begin gathering at Sensoryscape, a tourist site on the island resort of Sentosa in Singapore. With the sea breeze blowing and music filling the air, five AI-powered robot dogs dance to the rhythm.

They wave, jump, spin, and roll on the ground. After the performance, they interact and "chat" with visitors. Children excitedly run around them, while adults use their phones to capture photos and videos.

May-line, a tourist from Paris, France, held onto one of the robot dogs while enthusiastically asking her mother to take pictures and videos.

"It feels like I'm walking a dog, but it's a robot. That's very funny and surprising for me," she told Xinhua on May 5, adding that she would share the photos and videos with her friends back in France.

From April 18 to May 17, the Singapore Tourism Board and the Chinese travel platform Mafengwo jointly launched a pilot AI robot dog service at Sentosa and Mandai Wildlife Reserve in Singapore.

These AI robot dogs from China can not only "talk", but also "guide", "dance", and entertain visitors with playful gestures, offering overseas tourists a brand-new smart tourism experience.

The robot dogs were developed by Unitree Robotics, a technology company headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, while Mafengwo specially trained them for tourism scenarios. Equipped with multilingual interactive narration and multimodal environmental perception capabilities, the robot dogs can actively recognize their surrounding environments, understand tourists' needs, answer questions through reasoning, and interact with visitors through various movements.

Prior to arriving in Singapore, the robot dogs had already appeared at several tourist destinations in China. Their deployment in Singapore marks their first official overseas "assignment".