Sharpa North Starts Blizzard Shifts at a Shanghai Dairy Queen
Sharpa put its wheeled humanoid North behind the counter at Dairy Queen’s Wujiang Road store in Shanghai on 29 August 2026. Securities Times reports the robot restaurant opened that day, with North running a 55-step Blizzard sequence from order through pour. Sharpa’s own deployment page says each order is 50 to 60 consecutive manipulation steps, done end to end without cuts.
The point of the pilot is the kitchen, not a custom cell. The company says North uses the store’s existing equipment, ingredients, and process, unmodified. Hours are 10:00 to 22:00. Vision, touch, and force feedback handle cup pickup, toppings, blending, and the signature upside-down flip, with the robot correcting itself when a step drifts.
What the shift actually asks for
Sharpa’s North-at-work page breaks the Blizzard into contact problems a gripper usually ducks:
- Metal ring on a paper cup: thumb and index hold the ring against the cup through the blend. Force feedback sets grip so the cup does not crush.
- Cabinet handle: a standard narrow handle, not retrofitted. The hand has to be close to human size and shape to open it.
- Oreo toppings: three scoops per the SOP. Each scoop looks the same, so the policy has to remember where it is in the sequence instead of waiting for the scene to change.
- Upside-down flip: tactile grip, not teleop. Sharpa says no teleoperation device it has can do this move; North has to run it autonomously.
The stack named on that page is a latent world model for next-state prediction, CraftNet as a vision-language-action controller, and a “System 0” reflex loop for contact-rich grasp force.
The company behind the apron
Securities Times, citing Sharpa’s 28 August disclosure, says the company has raised more than 4.5 billion yuan in total, with Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, JD.com, and Transsion among industrial backers, plus Sequoia China, Qiming, and Meituan Longzhu. TechFlow, citing LatePost, puts the post-money valuation at 22 billion yuan. Sharpa was founded in late 2024 by Hesai CEO Li Yifan, CTO Xiang Shaoqing, and chief scientist Sun Kai. It is run separately from Hesai; Hesai’s interim report says it supplies power modules.
The first product was SharpaWave, a 22-DoF tactile hand that Securities Times says entered mass production in October 2025. North is the wheeled whole-body robot. Li told the paper that commercialization means finishing complex work in an unmodified, live store, not a rebuilt kitchen.
“The key to robot commercialization is completing complex work over the long term, fully autonomously, in a real environment with zero modification,” Li said, per Securities Times.
The same disclosure says the new capital is for core tech, hiring, and moving general-purpose robots from lab validation into the real world. Home use is framed as a later step, from 2028.
A Human’s Take
A 55-step ice-cream SOP on stock Dairy Queen gear is a better test than another warehouse tote clip. Cups deform, mixers fight you, and the room is full of customers. If North can hold a paper cup through a blend and still flip the Blizzard, that is a real contact loop. I still want hours, drop rate, and what a human does when the line gets busy. The funding headline is loud. The blender is the part I am watching.