Xiaomi's Humanoid Robot Starts Working on Car Production Line, Achieving World-Class Flexible Workpiece Handling

Xiaomi's humanoid robot has advanced from concept to factory floor faster than most expected. On July 14, Xiaomi's official tech Weibo account announced that its humanoid robot has started working at the company's car factory general assembly line, mastering long-duration flexible workpiece operations. The deployment directly challenges Tesla CEO Elon Musk's January statement that humanoid robots still cannot perform genuinely useful production work in factories. The robot was first publicly shown at Xiaomi's investor conference in late April, where it handed out gifts, shook hands, and gave high-fives to attendees. In just over two months, it entered a real production line environment. This quarter, the robot unlocked two new workstations: center console side panel sorting and carton folding recycling. In the console panel station, the robot must pick large, irregularly shaped, flexible cover panels from three rows of bins and precisely place them into a fixture cart across the aisle. This demands whole-body motion control, bimanual coordination, fine manipulation, and active compliance strategies. When reaching for far-side panels, the robot first grips the bin edge to stabilize its center of gravity, then reaches in - a capability that surpasses most humanoid robots, whose limited arm reach often causes balance issues. After grasping, the robot switches hands to adjust its grip, then uses its biomimetic dexterous hand's proprioceptive sensing for human-like fine adjustments before placement. If a panel catches on an obstruction, the robot uses force-aware active compliance to autonomously adjust and retry rather than blindly pushing. The carton folding workstation requires delicate fingertip control to pry open latches and precisely fold - actions beyond most industrial grippers. Both new workstations achieve over 90% success rates, while the robot's original screw-tightening task has reached 98% success. Xiaomi positions the robot's capabilities as world-class. Unlike many competitors still demonstrating in lab settings, Xiaomi has moved directly into its own production line, accumulating real-world operational data. This puts it in direct competition with Figure and other leading humanoid robotics companies pursuing factory deployment. Key developments to watch include whether the robot can scale to more workstations, transfer to other manufacturing scenarios, and whether Xiaomi will announce external commercial plans.