Xiaomi puts its humanoid on the car line and reports 98% on nuts

Lu Weibing, president of Xiaomi Group, described the company’s next-generation humanoid robot on 19 August 2026. It is bipedal, about 1.70 metres tall and 66 kilograms, with 66 degrees of freedom, half of them in the hands.

The number worth keeping is not a specification. The robot has already served what Xiaomi calls a four-month internship on the production line of the company’s own electric-vehicle factory, doing self-tapping nut installation and folding parts bins. On nut installation the success rate reached 98%. Lu framed the robotics programme as working with Xiaomi’s phone, car and home ecosystem rather than standing apart from it, with intelligent manufacturing as the first deployment.

Two limits belong on this. The robot remains a prototype, and its first public showing is still ahead of it: Xiaomi says it will appear before the public at the World Robot Conference in Beijing, and be exhibited in Europe afterwards. The account is Chinese-language, read here in translation, and the 98% figure is the company’s own with no independent measurement.

A carmaker testing robots in its own plant is grading its own homework, but it is also the only party with a line to lose. Four months of shifts and a stated failure rate of one nut in fifty is a narrower, more checkable claim than a demonstration video, and it is the kind of claim that can be falsified later.