China will struggle to make money from humanoid robots

Training centres require a large amount of space and many people to run them, as well as a legion of cutting-edge humanoids, which can run to 100,000 ($15,000) yuan apiece. This form of training costs 500-700 yuan per hour, reckons Corey Chan of HSBC, a bank. For every eight hours of coffee-pouring, the droid at the café station produces just three hours of useful data. The rest is spoiled, mostly by errors that engineers do not want the robots to learn. According to one estimate, 100m training hours will be required to develop a robot that can perform a wide variety of daily tasks.