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A Xiaomi humanoid robot has worked a full eight-hour shift on the company’s electric vehicle production line, Xiaomi says. The company says the robot sorted center console side covers with no human at the controls. The company posted a sped-up video of the run on X on Nov. 3.
The claim matters because a full shift is the unit factories plan around. A robot that can only work in short demo bursts can’t replace a person at a station. But Xiaomi has published the hours and not the results. For now, the eight hours tell you how long the robot ran, not how well it worked.
What Xiaomi’s video shows at the side-cover station
The post from Xiaomi’s @XiaomiTech_ account opens with “8 hours on the production line.” It went up as Xiaomi collected awards at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Electrek reported on Nov. 4.
The workstation is the center console side-cover sorting station at Xiaomi’s car factory. The robot pulls covers from bins, carries them to storage racks and slots each one into its place. Xiaomi says the robot spots and fixes its own anomalies and coordinates with the line’s control system. It also says the robot covered that station’s full day of production needs.
The video is labeled “Autonomous, 100x Speed.” At that rate, eight hours of work runs about 4.8 minutes on screen.
Xiaomi’s post doesn’t name the robot model or say how many machines took part. Electrek counted two legged robots and a wheeled humanoid upper body in the footage. So the “robots worked a shift” framing in some coverage goes further than Xiaomi’s own words. The company describes one robot doing the job.
From a three-hour nut test in March to sorting soft parts in July
This is the third public update on a program Lei Jun, Xiaomi’s founder and CEO, announced on March 2. He said humanoid robots had begun trial operations at Xiaomi’s auto plant, Gasgoo reported. They were loading self-tapping nuts at assembly stations and moving material bins. He called the move into a working factory “a meaningful first step.” He also said production demands that “each task must succeed virtually every time.”
The early numbers were modest. At the nut station, the robot ran on its own for three hours with a 90.2% installation success rate. It kept up with a 76-second line cycle, according to a Jiemian report republished by 36Kr.
By July 15, Xiaomi said that success rate had climbed to 98% after four months of training. That’s one percentage point short of what the company called the human qualification standard, per Gasgoo and TechNode. Xiaomi also added two harder jobs: the side-cover sorting seen in the new video and folding recycling totes. Both ran at a stable 90% success rate.
Side covers are the harder test because they are flexible parts. Xiaomi called it the first long, continuous run on flexible parts by a humanoid in a car factory, TechNode reported. Xiaomi has not published an independent check of that.
What Xiaomi still hasn’t said about the eight hours
The July figures came with success rates. The November video didn’t. As Electrek noted, Xiaomi hasn’t given the number of covers sorted or the share placed correctly. Nor has it said how often a person stepped in.
Power is the other gap. Any humanoid that runs for eight hours carries a big battery, swaps packs or plugs in. Xiaomi hasn’t said which.
That affects whether the robot could cover the next shift too.
The hardware is better documented. Xiaomi showed a new-generation robot at the World Robot Conference on Aug. 19. It stands about 1.70 meters tall and weighs 66 kilograms, 36Kr reported.
It has 66 degrees of freedom, 33 of them in its two hands. Xiaomi hasn’t confirmed that the same unit is in the shift video.
How the claim compares with Figure at BMW and Tesla’s Optimus
An eight-hour shift is not a first for humanoids in car plants. Figure’s F.02 robots spent 11 months at BMW’s Spartanburg, South Carolina, plant. By the 10th month they were completing full 10-hour shifts, BGR reported when Figure retired them in late 2025.
Figure put numbers on it. The robots logged more than 1,250 hours of runtime and loaded about 90,000 sheet-metal parts for more than 30,000 BMW X3s.
That program started small too. BMW’s own August 2024 release described a trial of several weeks. A Figure 02 placed sheet-metal parts into fixtures for chassis assembly.
In China, UBTech’s Walker S Lite helped staff with lifting at a Zeekr factory for 21 consecutive days in 2024, CnEVPost reported. Nio had used the larger Walker S earlier for quality checks and fixing logos to cars.
Tesla is further behind on its own timeline. On Tesla’s third-quarter call, Elon Musk said outside customers should get Optimus around the end of 2027. He named the hand as the main hardware problem, Electrek reported.
Against those, Xiaomi’s shift is a real step for its own program: three hours in March, eight now. It isn’t yet the kind of record Figure published, because the counts that would make it one are missing. Our coverage of Unitree’s H2 bodyguard robot video hit the same gap: polished footage, no autonomy data.
The AI model behind it, and Lei Jun’s five-year target
Xiaomi is also building the software. Its Xiaomi-Robotics-1 model learned from about 100,000 hours of recordings in more than 1,700 settings, The Decoder reported in July. Those hours come from people operating handheld grippers with cameras, not from robots working.
Several reports have described them as robot data.
On Nov. 3, Xiaomi also said an agent built on that model ran a home trial at Xiaomi Youth Apartments. It completed more than 50 tasks across three rooms in a session lasting over 30 minutes, PANews reported via KuCoin.
That’s a different skill from factory work. It’s closer to what ETH Zurich’s foot-solving robot dog is probing: handling objects in unplanned settings.
Lei wants large numbers of humanoids working across Xiaomi’s factories within five years, TechNode reported in March. The next useful disclosure is the eight-hour run’s part count and intervention rate. Xiaomi gave a success rate for the nut station in July, but not for this shift.