According to a post published by the “Big Tech Youth” WeChat account on August 7, Xiaomi’s Robotics Division has undergone a major restructuring: a new Embodied Intelligence and Applications Department has been established internally, led by Kong Tao, the former head of embodied intelligence at ByteDance Seed Robotics.
Under the restructuring plan, the new department has consolidated Chen Long’s VLA team, Cai Rui’s robotics embodied intelligence division, and others. Following the adjustment, all business directions across Xiaomi’s embodied intelligence efforts will fall under Kong Tao’s jurisdiction.
The article said that Kong Tao (Jason kong) previously joined Xiaomi and is primarily responsible for foundational embodied models for robots. According to internal information, at a recent internal meeting, the boss described his performance as “far beyond expectations.”
At the beginning of this year, Xiaomi’s robot began its “internship” at the self-tapping nut loading station in a Xiaomi automotive factory.
In March this year, at a real automotive factory, Xiaomi’s robot operated autonomously for three consecutive hours at the self-tapping nut loading station: the success rate for simultaneous installation on both sides was 90.2%, while also meeting the production-line takt time requirement of as little as 76 seconds.
In July this year, Xiaomi officially announced new progress in its robot’s “internship”: after a quarter of effort, the success rate for two-sided operation at the self-tapping nut loading station had risen to 98%. Compared with the qualification rate of human-operated work, the gap was just 1%, officially allowing the robot to “graduate” from its internship. At the same time, the robot began exploring new “internship” positions at new workstations in the logistics area of the final assembly workshop: sorting center-console side covers and folding and recycling material boxes, both of which achieved a success rate of 90%.