15 Humanoid Robots Are Now Working a Car Parts Line in China, at 98% Success

So basically: Fifteen humanoid robots are now doing a regular job on a car parts line in China. Leju Robotics and Zhaofeng, a Chinese auto parts maker, announced on Oct. 15 that the robots are working full time at Zhaofeng’s No. 3 factory in Hangzhou, not as a one day demo.

They pick up parts and load them into the next machine. The companies say they get it right 98% of the time.

What the robots actually do

The robots are Leju’s Kuavo humanoids. Each one stands at its own station, 15 in total, and handles more than 10 kinds of parts. The job is picking small parts, like wheel hub bearings about 3 to 5 inches wide, out of wire bins, turning around, and setting them in place for the next step.

A reporter from Securities Times watched one do it: lean down slowly, grab a bearing, turn slowly, and gently set it down.

The numbers

These come from the companies, not an outside audit:

• 98% loading success rate
• About 1,000 hours of running time
• More than 2 months on site without a breakdown
• Helped produce more than 60,000 parts
• More than 40,000 pieces of training data collected a month

The catch is speed

Each loading cycle takes the robot up to about 40 seconds. A skilled worker at the same station does it in about 15 seconds. So right now the robot takes more than twice as long.

The 98% number also doesn’t tell you how long it takes to recover when a pick fails, or how often a person has to step in.

Why it still matters

Most humanoid videos are a robot doing something once for the camera. This is 15 robots doing the same boring job every day on a real production line. That’s the kind of proof factories actually care about.

There’s a second reason Zhaofeng and Leju are doing this. Every shift gives them real world data on how the robots move and fail, and that data is what makes the next version smarter. They’re also sharing an auto parts dataset with an open source robotics community so other developers can train on it.

Leju says the setup is built to copy to other factories. Its software breaks the loading job into more than 30 building blocks that can be snapped together without writing low level code, and a new skill can be pushed to many robots at once.

My take

Two and a half times slower than a person sounds bad, until you remember a robot doesn’t take breaks, doesn’t get hurt, and can work all night. This isn’t robots taking over factories yet. It’s the first real step, where they show up every day and do a job that’s slow but steady.