Nio is stepping up its push into robotics as the Chinese electric vehicle maker posted new campus recruitment listings seeking specialists in embodied AI and simulation systems.
In January, the local media outlet 21st Century Business Herald reported the EV maker formed a small unit of about 20 staff to explore four-legged robot development.
The team is led by Xu Kang, a former algorithm expert from the startup Momenta who joined Nio’s autonomous driving team in 2020.
The job postings, shared on Friday by automotive blogger 德卤爱开车 on Weibo, show that Nio is hiring for “AI Robotics Researcher/Engineer” roles in Shanghai.
The description focuses on injecting large model capabilities into physical robots to enable “precise closed-loop operation in the physical world.”
Robots and robotic dogs fall under embodied intelligence, one of the fastest-growing areas for applying artificial intelligence.
In July 2024, during Nio’s tech day event, founder and CEO William Li said, “I firmly believe that a successful intelligent EV company must also be a successful AI company.”
Candidates are expected to develop so-called VLA (vision–language–action) large models to improve environment understanding, task decomposition, and action generation.
Nio also called for engineers to design planning algorithms based on “Transformer” and “Diffusion Policy” to boost manipulation flexibility.
Another listing for “Robotics Simulation System Researcher/Engineer” focuses on the construction of high-fidelity virtual environments, including sensors, actuators, and interactive objects, to train and validate algorithms.
The company said these roles would support “Sim-to-Real tuning” and optimize simulation parameters for practical deployment.
As reported by EV in late August, the automaker registered new ‘NOMI’ trademarks expanding its AI brand to cover humanoid robots, teaching robots, biochip sensors, and integrated circuit chips.
Nio first introduced NOMI in 2017 as the car’s voice assistant system with AI integration coming later in the process to expand capabilities.
In terms of industrial robots at its EV factories, Nio’s ‘F2’ plant in Hefei operated last year with 310 Automated Guided Vehicles and nearly 1,000 industrial robots.
Yi Peng, Nio’s head of humanoid robots for intellectual engineering, said earlier this year the automaker had assembled a humanoid robot “squad” in 2023.
The company tested robotic arms equipped with 5G connectivity and vision algorithms, and integrated humanoid robots into quality-control tasks.
Partnerships with established robotics firms have also been trialed.
In February, UBTech’s Walker S humanoid robot was shown working on a Nio assembly line inspecting seat belts, locks, and headlights.
In July, a Kuavo humanoid robot running Huawei’s HarmonyOS was undergoing testing at Nio facilities.
Last year, XPeng unveiled its next-generation humanoid robot — Iron — which CEO He Xiaopeng said would integrate multiple in-house chips, 15 degrees of freedom, and bionic hands with tactile feedback.
The company aims to start mass production of its Iron robot next year, He Xiaopeng said earlier this month at the Munich Auto Show.
