Tech giant Xiaomi has tested self-developed humanoid robots for car production, as the company pushes forward with plans to deploy “a large number” of self-developed humanoid robots in its own factories over the next five years, company founder Lei Jun has said.

Lei, also Xiaomi’s CEO and chairman, shared an article on Monday about trial operations in the firm’s car production facility, where the robots were said to have operated autonomously for three continuous hours, successfully completing assembly tasks without human intervention.

In a video released by Xiaomi, the humanoid robots were shown picking screw nuts and tightening them to designated spots on car floors, achieving a 90.2 per cent success rate for simultaneous installation on both sides within Xiaomi’s rapid turnaround time for vehicle production – as fast as 76 seconds per unit.

The success rate was measured by the number of successful installations divided by total attempts, according to Xiaomi.

Xiaomi said the main technical challenges involved precise alignment with locating pins, handling variations in the nuts’ internal spline structures and countering magnetic forces that could affect gripping stability.

“This marks the first step towards stable application of Xiaomi’s humanoid robot in the field of intelligent manufacturing,” Lei said in a social media post on Tuesday.

He added that Xiaomi would continue to promote the use of general-purpose humanoid robots in smart manufacturing and anticipated that a large number of humanoid robots would be working in Xiaomi factories in the next five years.