Xiaomi’s humanoid robots work a full 8-hour shift in its EV factory
Xiaomi has released footage of its humanoid robots working a full 8-hour shift at its EV factory, sorting center console side covers for its cars. The company says the robots did it on their own, catching and fixing their own mistakes along the way.
If that’s fully autonomous, it’s truly impressive. But we’ve been disappointed by humanoid robot demos before, and Xiaomi left out the numbers that would let anyone check.
An 8-hour shift on the line
Xiaomi Tech posted the video on X on November 3, as the company picked up awards at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen. It shows the robots pulling side covers from bins, carrying them to storage racks, and placing them into slots, with a running clock of cumulative working time and an “Autonomous, 100x Speed” label in the corner.
According to Xiaomi, the robot covered the full day of production needs at that workstation. The company says it detected and corrected anomalies on its own and coordinated with the production line’s control system, calling it “another step toward real-world industrial deployment.”
This is the third milestone in a program Xiaomi has been running in public all year. In March, it put a humanoid in its Beijing EV factory as an “intern” installing self-tapping nuts. Xiaomi reported a 90.2% success rate over three hours, fast enough to meet the station’s 76-second cycle time. By July, it said that success rate was up to 98%, and it added two harder stations, including the side-cover sorting job from this week’s video.
Last December, Xiaomi’s CEO, Lei Jun, said the company plans to deploy humanoid robots in large numbers across its factories within five years.
Xiaomi also announced that its open-source Xiaomi-Robotics-1 AI model, pre-trained on 100,000 hours of real-world robot data, has started trial runs in Xiaomi staff apartments. In a 30-minute run, it completed more than 50 task chains across three rooms.
How autonomous was it
Xiaomi didn’t say how many parts the robots sorted, what the success rate was over eight hours, or how many times a human had to step in. It also didn’t explain how the robots stayed powered for a full shift: swapped batteries, a tether, or charging breaks.
And that matters, because “autonomous” in a robot video can mean anything. Tesla’s Optimus robots at the 2024 “We, Robot” event were remotely operated by humans, which Tesla didn’t disclose at the time. Last December, an Optimus took a suspicious tumble in a Miami demo, raising its hands to its head like a teleoperator pulling off a VR headset as it fell.
To be fair to Xiaomi, it has published success rates and cycle times for its earlier factory tests. That’s more than Tesla has ever shared about Optimus doing useful work, and Tesla now says it won’t deliver Optimus to outside customers until late 2027.
Look at the wheels
The most interesting moment in the video comes around the 1:37 mark. In a segment Xiaomi labels “Dropped Material: Multi-Robot Collaboration,” a humanoid upper body mounted on a wheeled base rolls in to help the two legged robots.
It’s not the only thing on wheels in that scene, either. The bins of parts are shuttled around by autonomous mobile robots, the same kind of wheeled platforms that have been moving materials in car factories for years.
Electrek’s Take
If this demo was truly fully autonomous for eight hours, with the robots handling their own errors, that’s one of the more impressive humanoid demos we’ve seen. Xiaomi deserves credit for putting its robots on a real production line and publishing some real numbers along the way. But we’ve been burned by “autonomous” robot demos before, so we’ll wait for more details before getting too excited.
The wheeled robot is our favorite part of the video, though. It’s a great example of why you shouldn’t bet everything on the humanoid form factor. Wheels are far more efficient than legs on most terrain, and a flat factory floor is the best-case scenario for wheels. A wheeled base doesn’t burn energy just to stay upright, it’s more stable when carrying parts, it has room for a much bigger battery (which would solve that 8-hour power question), and it needs fewer expensive actuators.
The value in these robots is in the hands, arms, and the AI driving them. Legs make sense in homes with stairs, and maybe that’s where Xiaomi wants to take them eventually. But factories were designed around carts and forklifts, not people walking around carrying parts.
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