Xiaomi is using its own car plant as the specification for robot hardware, measuring designs against 1,827 recorded factory procedures instead of laboratory benchmarks.
Xiaomi has disclosed a robot hand with 21 degrees of freedom, or independently controlled joint movements, whose design it derived from recorded work at its own electric-vehicle plant. 21st Century Business Herald reported that Xiaomi published the research on its official technology account on October 27. The hand is driven by 26 motors and carries about 1,500 touch sensors across the palm and fingers.
The more unusual part is the method. Rather than choosing the number of joints first, Xiaomi’s team recorded how workers handle parts and tools in its car factory, then tested in simulation how many joints a hand needed to do that work. It found that grasp success rose steeply up to about 21 joints and barely improved beyond 23.
Xiaomi described the hand as research. It has said nothing about production, pricing or sales to other companies, and none of the reports say whether the hand will be fitted to the humanoid robot Xiaomi has been testing in the same plant.
Factory recordings set the design brief
The data came from the pilot production center of Xiaomi Auto’s smart manufacturing department. Of 2,579 standard operating procedures across 16 typical workstations, the team captured 1,827 on multi-angle video and motion capture, covering more than 70.8% of manual operations at those stations, Guangzhou Daily reported.
The team then cleaned and segmented the recordings, mapped the human movements onto robot hands of different designs, and simulated grasps using the factory’s real tools and parts. Hands with 17 to 21 degrees of freedom achieved average stable-grasp success rates 15% to 38% higher than hands with 6 to 15. Above 23, the improvement in grasping slowed clearly, Mydrivers reported, which is why Xiaomi stopped at 21.
The analysis also guided which joints could share a motor. Joints whose movements correlated above 0.8 were treated as candidates for a shared drive, a common way to cut cost and weight in robot hands, 21st Century Business Herald reported. Chen Duan, a digital-economy researcher at the Central University of Finance and Economics, told the newspaper the approach lets the factory scene define the product, and Guangzhou Daily quoted him calling the tactile, force and assembly-timing data a scarce asset tied to real work.
Motors in the forearm keep the hand light
Most of the hand’s movement comes from tendons, cords pulled by motors housed in the forearm, with five low-load joints driven directly. Moving the motors out of the hand keeps the palm at 324 grams, which reduces the weight at the end of the robot arm and lets the control system respond faster, CNMO reported. Sensors on the tendons measure tension and correct for stretching, so the hand can control fingertip and grip force precisely.
The touch sensors have a resolution of 1 millimeter at the fingertips and finger joints and 2 millimeters on the palm, and the modules can be swapped out for maintenance. Heat is a real constraint: a single hand can draw about 100 watts or more at peak, and Xiaomi uses a thermal model that predicts temperature five to ten minutes ahead to within 3°C, adjusting task scheduling, joint torque and fan speed, according to 21st Century Business Herald. Ifeng Tech reported that real-robot tests with factory parts and tools improved both how human-like the grasps were and how often they succeeded, compared with Xiaomi’s earlier hand.
The new hand follows a design Xiaomi showed in March, which shrank the hand to roughly human size and added full-palm touch sensing and liquid cooling modeled on sweat glands.
The test is whether factory data turns into factory output
Xiaomi has been using its car plant as a training ground for robots all year. Its second-generation humanoid, shown at the World Robot Conference in August after a four-month factory internship, reached about 98% success on a nut-loading station by July, against about 99% for skilled workers, unwire.hk reported. EastFrontier covered the robot’s move from the factory to Beijing’s exhibition stage.
The robot business has no independent external revenue yet, and its value so far lies in internal cost savings and technology, Jiemian reported. Founder Lei Jun said in August that many humanoid robots would enter Xiaomi factories within five years.
The next milestone to watch is a disclosed deployment: the 21-joint hand fitted to a working robot on Xiaomi’s production line, with success rates on named tasks, or a decision to sell the hand to other robot makers.