Jian Yao, an AI engineer at XPENG, describes the IRON humanoid’s design goals and AI architecture at Humanoids Summit.
Yao says XPENG aims for IRON to resemble people in appearance, movement, independent navigation, communication, and actions. He stresses that assembling the hardware also requires solving thermal management, power, operating-system, and sensor-calibration challenges.
Yao describes VLT as an agent-like brain that interprets commands and coordinates navigation and manipulation. For example, it can send IRON to fetch a water bottle, respond if the bottle falls, and then resume the trip. VA 2.0 processes inputs such as video, text, touch, and the robot’s state to produce outputs for movement and manipulation.
XPENG collects manipulation, navigation, and communication examples through a data factory. Yao says battery, heat, and compute limits make it hard to run large models while still producing actions at high frequency. XPENG therefore co-designs its model architecture and inference engine for its hardware and trains multimodal models from scratch.
Yao gives the end of 2026 as XPENG’s target for commercialization and mass production. He says dealerships are one intended use case and that product-level reliability is expected. XPENG may consider releasing some foundation models, but its hardware-specific design could limit compatibility with other chips; Yao also describes real-time control as necessary to close small gaps in whole-body actions.
Briefs summarise talks and interviews; timestamps open the video at that moment. Claims in a talk are the speaker's own.
He Xiaopeng, chairman and CEO of XPeng, discusses the company’s humanoid robot Iron, robotics strategy, and how AI and engineering shape XPeng’s cars, with a host from MadeinChina.
Robotics enthusiast Kevin Wood, who works in robotics and AI and runs a YouTube channel, discusses humanoid design and recent robot news with Devin on The Humanoid Hub.
An XPENG presenter discusses Iron’s human interaction, multilingual conversation, memory, and question answering through demonstrations involving the G9L.
An XPENG presenter discusses how the company designed its next-generation Iron humanoid to balance human-like movement and appearance with engineering constraints.
An XPENG Robotics representative explains how the company designed its next-generation Iron humanoid to move and feel more human through biomimetic hardware, motion control and simulation.
Ashley Dudarenok interviews Sean Shi of XPeng Robotics about humanoid robot development, factory uses, AI, deployment and safety, with a focus on China.
