Xiaomi’s humanoid robots sorted car parts for 8 hours and recharged twice

Two of Xiaomi’s full-size humanoid robots have worked a complete shift on the assembly floor of the company’s electric car factory, pulling plastic side panels out of bins and slotting them into racks in the order the cars on the line need them. They stopped twice to recharge. When one of them dropped a part, a different robot on wheels rolled over and picked it up.

That last detail says as much about factory robots as the shift itself. Xiaomi presents the footage as proof that a humanoid can take over a real workstation without anyone redesigning the line around it. The same clip also shows where legs help on a factory floor and where they get in the way.

The job Xiaomi chose is harder than it sounds. The panels are the large, flexible covers that sit on either side of a car’s centre console, and they land in the bins at random angles. A robot has to find each one, work out which way it faces, grip it firmly enough not to slip but gently enough not to bend it, then drop it into the right slot in time with the line. Irregular, floppy parts like these are exactly what fixed industrial arms handle badly, which is why humanoid makers keep pointing to them.

According to Chinese reports on the video, which Xiaomi founder Lei Jun posted on Weibo, the machines are the CyberOne 02, successor to the CyberOne humanoid Xiaomi first showed in 2022. One is black, one is white. Small mobile robots ferry the bins to them, and the humanoids adjust their route and stride to meet each delivery. The pair recharged after 3 hours 2 minutes and again after 6 hours 3 minutes of work, and finished at 8 hours 5 minutes. Xiaomi says the run met the station’s full day of production and that the robots caught and corrected their own errors while staying in sync with the line’s control system.

Plenty of viewers asked the obvious question: why put a humanoid where a cheaper robot arm would do? Lei Jun’s answer was that this is a general-purpose robot, and its hardware doesn’t have to change for it to move to another job. That is the whole bet. An arm is faster, more precise and cheaper at one fixed task. A humanoid only earns its cost if the same machine can be wheeled, or walked, from station to station.

What Xiaomi left out matters more than what it showed. The video runs about six minutes, sped up and shot wide, so nobody watching can count grabs or spot misses. As Electrek pointed out, Xiaomi has not said how many panels the robots sorted, what their success rate was across the shift, or whether people stepped in. Its own wording is careful too: a “preliminary validation” at one workstation, not a robot crew running a production line. Robot demos labelled autonomous have misled before. The Optimus robots at Tesla’s 2024 We, Robot event were partly operated remotely by humans, which the company did not disclose at the time.

To Xiaomi’s credit, it has published hard numbers before. When the humanoids started as “interns” at the plant in March, installing self-tapping nuts, the company reported a 90.2% success rate over three hours, fast enough for the station’s 76-second cycle. By July it said the rate had reached 98%, against 99% for experienced workers, and it had added the side-panel sorting job and the folding of returnable boxes.

The wheeled helper may be the most useful part of the footage. Electrek’s Fred Lambert argued that a flat factory floor is the best case for wheels: a wheeled base burns no energy just staying upright, is steadier when carrying parts and has room for a far bigger battery, which might have made those two charging stops unnecessary. Legs pay off in homes with stairs. Factories were built around carts and forklifts.

Xiaomi is not alone on the factory floor. Figure says its robots logged more than 1,250 hours at BMW’s plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Chinese reports say AgiBot’s G2 humanoids now work an eight-in-the-morning to seven-at-night schedule at a Longcheer tablet factory in Nanchang. What these pilots share is the kind of work: stations that need a robot to look, judge and adapt, rather than repeat a fixed motion.

The same push is heading toward the home. Xiaomi-Robotics-1, the AI model Xiaomi released openly in July, is now on trial in Xiaomi staff apartments, where it ran for more than 30 minutes across three rooms and over 50 tasks, from tidying desks and clearing rubbish to putting things back where they belong. Neither the robots nor a home version are for sale anywhere, and Xiaomi has given no price or launch date for any market.

Lei Jun said last December that Xiaomi plans to put humanoids to work in large numbers across its factories within five years. The numbers that will decide it are the ones this shift video left out: how many stations one robot can cover, how often it fails, and what an hour of its work costs next to a person’s.

Tags: robotics, humanoid robots, factory automation, Figure AI, CyberOne, Lei Jun