Xiaomi Corp. has tapped Lu Zeyu, a former member of Tesla's Optimus Dexterous Hand team, to head the development of its own dexterous hand technology, signaling the company's deeper push into the humanoid robotics sector.
Lu, who joined Tesla in 2021 to work on the hand design for its Optimus robot, announced on social media that he would leave the electric vehicle giant after more than two years to take on the role of head of dexterous hand development at Xiaomi.
He expressed his excitement to join Xiaomi's robotics team and work with talented colleagues to accelerate the engineering and technological development of dexterous hand technology.
At Tesla, Lu played a key role in designing the hands for the Optimus robot, focusing on core aspects of tactile sensor development, dexterous grasping, manipulation, and hand structure design.
His work aligned closely with his doctoral research in robotics at the National University of Singapore (NUS), making him a strong addition to Xiaomi's rapidly expanding robotics division.
Xiaomi has positioned robotics and embodied intelligence as a core component of its next-generation technology strategy. The company aims to move beyond its roots as a consumer electronics manufacturer and become a major player in intelligent platforms for the physical world.
As part of this strategy, Xiaomi is integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into everything from home robots to smart vehicles, with a particular focus on autonomous driving and human-robot interactions.
In a major announcement on November 21, Xiaomi revealed its self-developed embodied AI model, MiMo-Embodied, which it has made open-source. The model, which has demonstrated strong performance across key industry benchmarks, is designed to power robots and autonomous vehicles by enabling them to understand and respond to their environment, perform tasks, and plan actions.
MiMo-Embodied's integration of affordance reasoning, task planning, and spatial understanding aims to bridge gaps between physical robots and AI systems used in autonomous driving.
The launch of MiMo-Embodied is not just a technological milestone but also part of Xiaomi's broader vision for a "Human-Vehicle-Home All-Scenario Ecosystem." This strategy seeks to create a unified system that integrates home service robots, smart vehicles, and IoT devices in a way that allows them to understand and respond to both structured and unstructured real-world scenarios.
In the future, Xiaomi envisions users giving natural language commands to seamlessly control robots in their homes, such as asking a robot to collaborate with a refrigerator to plan and prepare meals. At the same time, vehicles equipped with Xiaomi's AI models would navigate complex urban environments, reacting to unplanned events like construction detours or sudden pedestrian movement.
Xiaomi's open-source approach to MiMo-Embodied is designed to democratize AI development by lowering the entry barrier for developers and encouraging them to contribute to the ecosystem. The company hopes to replicate the success of Android's open-source model, which fueled the rapid growth of the smartphone industry.
However, Xiaomi's ambitious plans come with challenges. Key obstacles include the need for significant edge computing power, data security concerns, and navigating complex regulatory frameworks. Nonetheless, the company is using its dual focus on embodied intelligence and autonomous driving to carve out a differentiated strategy, one that competes with industry giants like Google and Tesla.
In a further sign of its commitment to AI, Xiaomi recently attracted Luo Fuli, a well-known female figure in AI, who joined the company in early November. Luo, who has set her sights on artificial general intelligence (AGI), echoed Xiaomi's vision of intelligence moving beyond language processing to the physical world.
While Xiaomi has not yet disclosed a specific timeline for the launch of its robotics products, the hiring of Lu Zeyu and its aggressive investment in AI-driven hardware and software suggests the company is moving swiftly toward commercializing humanoid robots.
