"World's supermarket gets robot security guards

As the Yiwu International Trade Market falls quiet at 10 p.m., a legion of four-legged robots step out of automatically opening doors to begin their nightly patrol, El.kz cites Xinhua.

Since last month, the sprawling market in Yiwu, a major foreign trade hub in east China's Zhejiang Province, has started using 16 robot dogs as its new "security guards," according to the market's management.

As the world's largest small commodities market, the Yiwu International Trade Market features a labyrinth of crisscrossing aisles and tens of thousands of stalls packed into an operational area of over 6.4 million square meters. Patrolling a complex of this scale has been a grueling task, at least for humans.

"The robots never get tired. When their batteries run low, they automatically return to their docking stations to recharge," said Zhu Weijie with the market's management company.

It takes a quadruped robot 1.5 hours to patrol an area that used to take human patrollers 2.5 hours to cover, Zhu said, also praising the robots' ability to "leap over steps, navigate through complex passageways and reach into blind spots that are difficult for humans to inspect."

Equipped with infrared thermal imaging devices and high-definition cameras, the robots help staff monitor crowd flow during daytime patrols. At night, they can detect abnormal heat sources such as fires or intruders.

"Beyond the novelty, it truly feels like an added layer of security," Xu Yan, a merchant at the market, remarked on the newly-employed robot security guards.

Yiwu is known as the place where the world buys small goods. In 2025, the city's foreign trade value hit 836.5 billion yuan (about 124 billion U.S. dollars), and its export value ranked first among Chinese county-level regions.

The market management said they would continue to use robotic patrols to train recognition algorithms and upgrade the equipment, while also improving the coordination between the robots and security personnel.

China has been accelerating the deployment of robots in real-world settings, especially for repetitive, strenuous and high-risk tasks where human labor is in short supply.

Earlier this year, Chinese authorities jointly launched a special action plan for real-scene training of humanoid robots and embodied AI, aiming to identify more than 100 high-value application scenarios.

Chinese-developed quadruped robots accounted for nearly 70 percent of global sales in the first half of 2026, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.