The robots are coming! Meet the automated waiters ready to take over Manchester's dining hotspots

As anyone familiar with the Terminator movies will be quite aware, the apocalypse began with automated restaurant waiter robots took over Los Angeles. It didn’t really, of course, but it very much might have done, had filmmaker James Cameron made a few tweaks at the early stages.

Nevertheless, the robots are here, they’re in Manchester. And they’re ready to bring ‘automation’ to the hospitality industry.

Robotic company Pudu Robotics has been a hit - and in some cases a miss - at the Northern Restaurant and Bar show, taking place at Manchester Central, where it has been exhibiting four of its hospitality robots, the first time they’ve been exhibited in the UK.

With its cat-like LCD face, the seemingly innocent BellaBot is a ‘premium delivery robot’, which can deliver dishes around a restaurant, carrying a stack of trays, and mapping out the space as it goes.

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The KettyBot does the same job, but on a smaller scale, and can also be used as a ‘reception bot’, greeting guests and escorting them to their table, and with its big screen on the front, also be used as a roving advertising screen.

The Puductor 2 bot is a cleaning robot, which can clean and disinfect floors around hospitality spaces, while another, the HolaBot, can be ‘paged’ to arrive at a certain table, take away dirty plates and transport them to the kitchen.

David Ramsden, head of sales and marketing for the robot’s distributor Hutech Robotics, told the Manchester Evening News: “You’ve got a robot here that can serve 24 hours a day, if you want it to, seven days a week. It’s not going to ask for holidays, it’s not going to ask for sick pay, it’s not going to bother not turning up.

“From an HR point of view