Xiaomi Establishes Embodied Intelligence Department Led by Former ByteDance Robotics Head
Xiaomi has restructured its robotics division to establish a new Embodied Intelligence and Application Department, appointing Kong Tao, the former head of ByteDance's Seed Robotics, to lead the unit. This reorganization consolidates various business directions, including the Vision-Language-Action (VLA) team and the robotics embodiment department, under Kong's leadership. This organizational consolidation highlights Xiaomi's aggressive push to integrate advanced AI models with physical hardware, accelerating the deployment of humanoid robots in manufacturing environments like its smart car factories. Xiaomi's humanoid robots have been testing in its car factories, achieving a 98% success rate in self-tapping nut installation (just 1% below human workers) and a 90% success rate in new tasks like center console side cover sorting.
## BACKGROUND
Embodied AI refers to artificial intelligence systems embedded within physical bodies, such as robots, that perceive and interact with the physical world. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are a key technology in this field, translating visual inputs and textual instructions directly into low-level physical actions for the robot to execute.