Chinese company releases video of humanoid robot walking off assembly line on its own

• China’s Xpeng has begun mass‑producing its IRON humanoid robot, with the machine autonomously walking off the production line in early September and slated to ship to commercial customers next year; the company says the robot features 82 degrees of freedom, can move at about two metres per second and will be built on automated lines that exceed 80 % core process automation.
• At the same time, the People’s Liberation Army is accelerating the transfer of laboratory breakthroughs to battlefield tools, as evidenced by a September 7 procurement notice that called for “embodied humanoid robot intelligent perception and dexterous operation systems,” a June 2026 budget of roughly $300,000 for data‑collection and labeling of camera, radar and motion data, and a post‑games directive from the PLA Daily urging researchers to fast‑track combat‑ready humanoids.
• Parallel advances in artificial‑intelligence control are expanding robot agility: researchers at UC Berkeley and Stanford unveiled the BeyondMimic framework, enabling a humanoid to sprint, spin‑kick and combine a wide repertoire of human‑like motions without task‑specific retraining, while NVIDIA’s SONIC controller, described in a late‑August Science Robotics paper, translates VR, video and language commands into robot actions, further broadening motion repertoires.
• South Korea showcased its KAIROS AI humanoid at the Global Forum on Mechanical Engineering on September 7, demonstrating traditional dance and dynamic full‑body motions, and industry data released on September 9 confirmed that China now accounts for about 97 % of global humanoid‑robot shipments, with domestic output projected at over 62 000 units in 2026.
• Media outlets in the United States and Europe have highlighted these developments, noting Xpeng’s video of IRON exiting the assembly line on September 11 and the broader race between Chinese and American firms to bring mass‑produced, AI‑driven humanoids to market.

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