China loves its robots, and we don’t mean Hu Jintao. As ITN reports, this country “currently tops the world in robotics competitions in terms of how many people take part.” Take, for instance, the first Beijing College Student Robotics Competition over the weekend at Beijing Information Science and Technology University. About 300 people from 99 teams from Beijing and Taiwan took part, showing off robots that could dance like Michael Jackson and play five-a-side soccer. There was even one that performed moves (poorly, I’d say) to PSY’s Gangnam Style.

The ITN story is above and after the jump on Youku for those in China. Here’s the YouTube version of the robot dancing to PSY. Again, not really good, but people seem determined to inundate the Internet with Gangnam videos, so I’ll do my part.

The singularity approaches ever closer. At a restaurant in Harbin, Heilongjiang province called Haohai Robot Themed Restaurant (昊海机器人主体餐厅), robots greet customers, cook and serve food, and generally charm. Even WALL-E, the lovable protagonist in the Pixar movie by the same name, calls this place home*. We’re told that the restaurant employs 18 robots, each with the mental ability of three- to four-year-olds and worth about 200,000 yuan.

The manager, Liu Hasheng, is practically begging for the arrival of intellectual event horizon, in which cyborgs become our overlords with their superior intellectual and physical prowess. Listen to him:

Opening this robot-themed restaurant, (the owner’s) main idea, his primary thinking, I want robots to be a part of human lives as quickly as possible. I predict robots, within 10 years, will become quite common. Every household will have a cooking robot, an elderly-assisting robot, a cleaning robot. There’ll even be security robots.

Security robots. With lasers.

*Copyright infringement alert.

Pictures via Sina:

Embedded below is one of the Youku videos I used to make the above YouTube compilation. The other two are here and here.

(H/T Alicia)