Robots fully working in Xiaomi factories

Performing complex tasks in the automotive industry

Xiaomi revealed that it is already testing humanoid robots, working directly on the assembly line of its electric vehicle factory. In one of the tests disclosed by the company, the robot was responsible for installing self-screwing nuts on the structural floor of vehicles.

A task considered complex in the automotive industry, the result attracted attention. The humanoid managed to complete the process in just 76 seconds within the time required by the production line, maintaining a success rate close to 90% for 3 consecutive hours of work.

The operation requires extreme precision.

The robbery needs to take the nuts from an automatic feeding system, place them correctly at the fixing points and coordinate their movements with conveyor belts and automatic positioning systems. The challenge is not just tightening the component, the nuts have knurled internal structures, the holdings vary slightly in each piece and magnetic forces can interfere with the fit, factors that significantly increase the complexity of the task.

To solve this, Xiaomi developed a system based on an artificial intelligence model of the vision, language and action type with about 4.7 billion parameters. This type of model allows robots to interpret the environment, understand the partner and execute coordinated movements using multiple sources of information at the same time.

It combines data from computer vision, touch sensors and the exception of joint positions to understand what is happening around it. In addition, the system was trained with reinforcement learning in virtual simulations, where the robot faced hundreds of millions of simulated perturbations to learn to maintain balance and precision even in unexpected situations.

The final control mixes traditional optimization algorithms with this advanced learning, allowing the robot to react in less than 1 millisecond. According to Xiaomi, this is just the beginning. The company states that it is already testing humanoids in other stages of production with the aim of bringing this type of technology to large-scale applications in automotive manufacturing.

And as robots begin to work inside factories, some wonder, what other types of machines will occupy other real-world environments?