Xiaomi deployed a humanoid robot on its automotive production line for the first time, with the machine operating autonomously for three hours, the company announced this Monday on social media.
The humanoid was deployed at a self-tapping nut installation workstation, where it achieved a dual-side simultaneous installation success rate of 90.2% — meaning roughly one in ten attempts failed, a figure the company said is steadily improving as testing continues.
The robot was deployed on a self-tapping nut installation workstation, in which it achieved a dual-side simultaneous instalment success rate of 90.2%
Xiaomi said in a statement that the humanoid “continuously and accurately picked up self-tapping nuts” during the task “from an automatic nail-feeding device and placed them onto positioning fixtures for self-tapping tightening.”
The company highlighted that the “most challenging part” of the manufacturing process is the installation of the self-tapping nuts.
The spline structure inside the equipment, the inconsistency in the gripping posture, and the “pulling force caused by magnetic attraction on the positioning pins” further intensified the difficulty of the assembly operation.
The solution uses Xiaomi‘s proprietary 4.7-billion-parameter Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, dubbed “Xiaomi-Robotics-0”, combined with reinforcement learning.
This approach reduces reliance on manual training data and enables the robot to adapt quickly and learn from its environment.
Xiaomi stated that the deployment of its humanoid robots at the self-tapping nut installation workstation marks a key milestone towards their “large-scale application in automotive manufacturing scenarios.”
The company told Chinese tech outlet ITHome that deployments and validation tests are underway at several other production stations, with further updates to be announced later.
Five-Year Roadmap
Last December, CEO Lei Jun said in an interview that Xiaomi expected to deploy humanoid robots at large-scale in its factories within the next five years.
Using the company’s auto plant as an example, the co-founder and CEO noted that X-ray machines paired with AI vision models can inspect large die-cast components in two seconds, achieving speeds ten times faster and accuracy five times higher than manual checks.
The CEO also said the company planned to expand humanoid robots into household settings, which he said “could open a new trillion-yuan market”.
Other Brands’ Deployments
Xiaomi is the latest company to deploy humanoid robots into its automotive production.
Last Friday, BMW Group announced that it will begin a pilot project of humanoid robots at its Leipzig plant in Germany this summer, after another testing implementation scheduled to start in April.
At the end of January, Tesla‘s CEO Elon Musk said, during the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call, that the Optimus humanoid robot was “doing some basic tasks in the factory.”
Tesla is set to launch version 3 of its humanoid robot later this year.
Meanwhile, Chinese automaker XPeng is also planning to begin building what it calls industry’s first humanoid robot mass production base in its headquarters — Guangzhou — in the first quarter.
The company founded and led by He Xiaopeng aims to achieve large-scale production of its humanoid robots by the end of this year.
