Xiaomi shows humanoid robots sorting car parts for a full 8-hour shift at EV factory

Xiaomi has released footage of humanoid robots working a full 8-hour shift at its electric-vehicle factory, sorting center console side covers for its cars, according to a report by Electrek. The company says the robots worked autonomously, but it did not publish figures that would let outsiders verify that.

The Xiaomi Tech account put the video on X on November 3, while the company was receiving awards at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Electrek reported. The footage shows the robots taking side covers from bins, carrying them to storage racks and placing them into slots. A running clock shows cumulative working time, and a label in the corner reads "Autonomous, 100x Speed".

Xiaomi says the robot met a whole day's production needs at that workstation. The company also says the machines spotted and fixed their own anomalies and worked in coordination with the production line's control system. It described the demonstration as "another step toward real-world industrial deployment."

What Xiaomi did not disclose

Electrek said Xiaomi gave no count of parts sorted and no success rate for the shift, and did not say how often a human had to intervene. The company also did not explain how the robots stayed powered for a full shift, whether through swapped batteries, a tether or charging breaks.

Electrek noted that "autonomous" in a robot video can mean different things. It pointed to Tesla's Optimus robots at the 2024 "We, Robot" event, which were remotely operated by humans, something Tesla did not disclose at the time, according to the outlet.

Part of a year-long program

The shift is the third milestone in a program Xiaomi has been running publicly this year, Electrek said. In March, the company placed a humanoid in its Beijing EV factory as an "intern" installing self-tapping nuts, and reported a 90.2% success rate over three hours, fast enough for the station's 76-second cycle time. By July, Xiaomi said the rate had risen to 98% and it had added two harder stations, including the side-cover sorting job.

Electrek said Xiaomi has published success rates and cycle times for its earlier factory tests, which it described as more than Tesla has shared about Optimus doing useful work. According to the report, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun said last December that the company plans to put humanoid robots to work in its factories in large numbers within five years.

In one segment of the video, labeled "Dropped Material: Multi-Robot Collaboration," a humanoid torso on a wheeled base comes in to assist the two legged robots, Electrek said. Bins of parts are moved by autonomous mobile robots, the wheeled platforms that have long carried materials in car factories.

Xiaomi also said its open-source Xiaomi-Robotics-1 AI model, trained beforehand on 100,000 hours of real-world robot data, has begun trials in staff apartments. In one half-hour run, the model finished over 50 task chains spanning three rooms, according to the report.

Electrek wrote that if the demonstration was fully autonomous for eight hours, it would be one of the more impressive humanoid demos it has seen, but that it would wait for more details.