An Xpeng Iron humanoid robot on display at the Beijing Auto Show in April 2026. Credit: CnEVPost
- Xpeng’s robotics center has added nine second-tier departments, with chairman He Xiaopeng concurrently heading the product department.
- The reshuffle reflects how China’s EV startups are reshaping their organizations around robotics.
Xpeng (NYSE: XPEV) is undertaking a major overhaul of its robotics business to marshal more group resources and accelerate the path to mass production.
The company’s robotics center has set up nine new second-tier departments, and chairman and CEO He Xiaopeng is now concurrently heading the product department after personally taking charge of the robotics center, according to a report by 21jingji on Friday.
The nine departments also include the embodied systems engineering department, the general foundation model department, the brand marketing department, as well as the control and safety development department, the embodied intelligence department, the data closed-loop department, the product matrix department and the project management department, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.
Earlier this month, He said in an internal letter that he would personally serve as the “CEO” of the robotics business to speed up commercialization.
This upgrade at the senior management level marks an important step in Xpeng’s strategic transformation from a smart electric vehicle company into a “physical AI company,” he said on June 10.
He said in the letter at the time that over the past year he had spent at least a full day each week on the robotics business, engaging in in-depth thinking, discussions and decision-making.
The latest reshuffle also reflects how China’s EV startups are reorganizing around robotics, 21jingji noted.
On Feb 14, Li Auto (NASDAQ: LI) restructured its intelligence division into three teams covering humanoid robots, software bodies and foundation models. In May, Li Auto added three more second-tier departments — embodied engineering, embodied interaction and embodied behavior, according to the report.
Xpeng is both a humanoid robot company and a carmaker, allowing many of its capabilities to serve both fields.
That reuse is reflected in its team setup. Gu Jie, head of the robotics center’s embodied systems engineering department, is also Xpeng’s powertrain chief and previously led the team that developed its super extended-range technology.
On the software side, VLA (Vision-Language-Action) and world models are technical approaches that can serve both autonomous driving and robotics. As a result, Liu Xianming, head of the general foundation model department, is also the head of Xpeng’s general intelligence center, according to the report.
At the recently concluded CVPR 2026 (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference 2026), Liu attended the first workshop on deploying embodied intelligence foundation models. In an article he published afterward, he wrote that VLA learns from human behavior while world models learn from how the world evolves, and that the two complement each other.
Chen Long, head of Xiaomi EV’s smart driving foundation model, has expressed the same view. He combined both capabilities in Xiaomi’s autonomous driving model Xiaomi OneVL, describing his work as building a unified architecture for autonomous driving and robotics.
A CTO at a humanoid robot maker said the AI infrastructure used to train autonomous driving models, along with the related experience, can equally be applied to robots. For robots, AI infrastructure matters even more than the large model, the person said, according to 21jingji.
The year 2026 is seen as the first year of humanoid robot commercialization. Competition among manufacturers has evolved from last year’s focus on teams, demos and papers to a contest over facilities, mass production and deliveries, and a number of companies have already collapsed on the eve of large-scale production, 21jingji noted.
A humanoid robot CEO argued that carmakers and phone makers have an edge in robotics, because they have a better grasp of production cadence, standards and the broader balance of supply, manufacturing and sales.
Mr. He said in his June 10 internal letter that the robotics business now integrates multiple core modules within Xpeng — including hardware, AI large models, supply chain, precision manufacturing and marketing.
This high degree of complexity requires deeper overall collaboration at the critical moment of the mass-production campaign, turning the group’s strengths into a powerful fighting force, he said.
Xpeng’s humanoid robot production base will span about 110,000 square meters, covering processes from R&D to large-scale manufacturing.
