During one of the busiest travel periods of the year, commuters in Hefei, in a city in east China's Anhui Province, were greeted not just by trains, but by robots.
Humanoid assistants, four-legged inspection dogs and drones patrolled metro stations and tunnels, helping passengers with directions, checking infrastructure, and scanning for faults.
It’s China’s first full-space "robot cluster" for rail transit, deployed during the Spring Festival travel rush.
“The full-space robot intelligent dispatching platform mainly operates in three areas: intelligent service within stations, vehicle inspection, and tunnel inspection,” said Dai Rong, the director of the Science and Education Center at Hefei Rail Transit.
"We hope it can assist human staff, improve our work efficiency, and reduce work intensity to empower Hefei's rail transit operations through technology."
Robots on the platform and under the trains
At several stations, humanoid robots guided passengers with directions and transfer inquiries, while robot dogs patrolled platforms for safety.
Underneath the trains, autonomous inspection robots navigated 1.5-metre-deep maintenance trenches, scanning wheels, bolts and other components with high-definition cameras and ultrasonic sensors.
Any cracks or loose parts were flagged immediately, speeding up checks that would normally take hours.
"In the future, we aim to build this platform using large AI model technologies to provide these robot dogs and drones with a better central 'brain' for control," said Luo Lei, a senior supervisor at the Science and Education Center. "This will enable them to identify and respond to various abnormal situations more accurately."
The technology does raise the question: just how much can these machines do, will human input still be needed in the future, and should other cities elsewhere be paying attention?
While the Hefei system is designed to assist humans rather than replace them, its capabilities hint at the growing role AI and robotics could play in public transport, infrastructure monitoring, and urban safety in the years to come.
Check out the metro robots in action in the video player above.
