Chinese automotive company XPeng made a big splash last year with its Terminator-like humanoid robot, dubbed Iron. The bipedal robot — which features certain eyebrow-raising design choices — was seen sauntering across the stage with an impressively lifelike “catwalk” gait.
But the company may have flown a little too close to the Sun. During a similar tech demo at a mall in Shenzhen, China, over the weekend, the robot once again ambled across a marbled floor in front of an eager crowd — only to suddenly start twisting its back in an unnatural way before falling over and faceplanting with an audible thud.
Footage circulating online shows someone break Iron’s fall. It eventually took three individuals to drag the 154-pound, five-foot-eight humanoid robot away from the prying eyes of the curious crowd. Some audience members can be heard chuckling to themselves as the robot is carried away.
Many netizens joked that it was the ultimate proof that Xpeng’s robot is not, in fact, a human in a costume, as some suspected when its human-like gait was first revealed.
The damage appears to have been done. As the South China Morning Post reports, footage of Xpeng’s fumble circulated widely on Chinese social media networks, eventually forcing cofounder and CEO He Xiaopeng to address the situation on Weibo.
“It reminds me of how all toddlers learn to walk,” he wrote in the post, as quoted by the SCMP. “After a fall, they will stand firm; the next step is to begin running, and to keep running.”
The company was clearly rattled by all of the negative press coverage. During the next day of Xpeng’s marketing campaign, the robot was strapped to a frame, per the newspaper.
Xpeng is far from alone in struggling to keep its bipedal robots on two feet. We’ve seen plenty of other humanoid robots by manufacturers stumble as well. Case in point, one recent viral video appears to show a human teleoperator taking off their headset, causing the Tesla Optimus robot they were controlling to reel back and collapse.
In November, a video circulating online showed a Russian humanoid robot, dubbed AIdol, fall while trying to walk across a stage.
Other companies have made major strides in keeping their robots upright. Researchers have managed to teach Chinese manufacturer Unitree’s popular G1 robot to be extremely resilient, allowing it to survive a lot of abuse, from a direct dropkick to being jerked around by a chain around its neck.
Most recently, Unitree had one of its G1 robots map out the Winter Olympics logo by trekking 130,000 steps across a snowy, frozen landscape in Altay prefecture in northern China, as temperatures sank to -52 degrees Fahrenheit.
Xpeng is hoping to kick off “large-scale mass production” of its Iron robot before the end of the year — stability be damned, apparently.
