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XPeng promised a "human-like gait." It turned out to be a human-like fall.
The shopping mall in Shenzhen was not crowded at the weekend because of the sales. XPeng gathered a crowd: the company brought its humanoid robot IRON to the public and staged a show that was supposed to hint at the main thing. They say that the technology is already confident enough to go into mass adoption in 2026.
The show turned out to be spectacular and at the same time very honest. IRON made a "podium" pass, communicated with the audience live, posed next to the children, and the presentation itself was clearly designed to make the robot look not like a factory machine, but like a friendly character. According to the company, a smoother gait is helped by a "human" spine with five degrees of freedom and a well-thought-out hip design that improves balance, Humanoids Daily writes.
But then something happened that instantly turns a beautiful demonstration into a viral video. After a successful pass, the robot on stage lost its balance for a second, began to fall back and fell. The employee managed to partially soften the fall, but IRON still ended up face down on the stage. It was quickly removed for configuration, after which the robot returned and communicated with the children again, asking funny questions. And the next day, according to the South China Morning Post, he was no longer allowed to walk: they left the IRON on a safety frame and limited themselves to the "conversational" part.
This episode is especially revealing against the background of the ambitions of the project. The second generation of the IRON XPeng was introduced in November 2025, after a year of improvements to movement, control and balance. From the very beginning, the head of the company, He Xiaopeng, relied on the fact that the robot should not just move, but move like a human and at the same time safely next to people.
Outwardly, IRON is really trying to "humanize". Observers noted a layer that the developers call "fascia": this is a 3D-printed lattice under the outer shell, simulating a muscular structure. The idea is to dampen vibrations and smooth out the sudden jerks typical of bipedal robots, and at the same time make the image less mechanical. In the future, it is precisely this kind of feed that should help robots take root first in stores and then at home.
According to the stated characteristics, IRON is designed for live communication: it must walk, talk and react to people in real time. Height about 178 cm, weight about 70 kg. The design has 62 active joints so that the robot can turn, shrug and keep its balance, and each hand has 22 degrees of freedom for working with both small objects and larger ones. The "face" replaces the curved screen around the head, which changes expression during communication.
According to XPeng, three Turing AI processors with a total performance of 2,250 trillion operations per second are responsible for calculations, and the vision, language, action system connects environmental recognition with movements. The robot was trained on thousands of hours of human movement data, and the walking speed is stated to be up to 2 meters per second. The first step is to launch IRON in retail spaces, and then expand the tasks to operational scenarios.
Falling on stage, of course, looks awkward, but in a sense, this is the real test. The human-like gait impresses exactly as long as the robot does not stand still and does not start to lose in the most important competition, in the ability not to fall.
The shopping mall in Shenzhen was not crowded at the weekend because of the sales. XPeng gathered a crowd: the company brought its humanoid robot IRON to the public and staged a show that was supposed to hint at the main thing. They say that the technology is already confident enough to go into mass adoption in 2026.
The show turned out to be spectacular and at the same time very honest. IRON made a "podium" pass, communicated with the audience live, posed next to the children, and the presentation itself was clearly designed to make the robot look not like a factory machine, but like a friendly character. According to the company, a smoother gait is helped by a "human" spine with five degrees of freedom and a well-thought-out hip design that improves balance, Humanoids Daily writes.
But then something happened that instantly turns a beautiful demonstration into a viral video. After a successful pass, the robot on stage lost its balance for a second, began to fall back and fell. The employee managed to partially soften the fall, but IRON still ended up face down on the stage. It was quickly removed for configuration, after which the robot returned and communicated with the children again, asking funny questions. And the next day, according to the South China Morning Post, he was no longer allowed to walk: they left the IRON on a safety frame and limited themselves to the "conversational" part.
This episode is especially revealing against the background of the ambitions of the project. The second generation of the IRON XPeng was introduced in November 2025, after a year of improvements to movement, control and balance. From the very beginning, the head of the company, He Xiaopeng, relied on the fact that the robot should not just move, but move like a human and at the same time safely next to people.
Outwardly, IRON is really trying to "humanize". Observers noted a layer that the developers call "fascia": this is a 3D-printed lattice under the outer shell, simulating a muscular structure. The idea is to dampen vibrations and smooth out the sudden jerks typical of bipedal robots, and at the same time make the image less mechanical. In the future, it is precisely this kind of feed that should help robots take root first in stores and then at home.
According to the stated characteristics, IRON is designed for live communication: it must walk, talk and react to people in real time. Height about 178 cm, weight about 70 kg. The design has 62 active joints so that the robot can turn, shrug and keep its balance, and each hand has 22 degrees of freedom for working with both small objects and larger ones. The "face" replaces the curved screen around the head, which changes expression during communication.
According to XPeng, three Turing AI processors with a total performance of 2,250 trillion operations per second are responsible for calculations, and the vision, language, action system connects environmental recognition with movements. The robot was trained on thousands of hours of human movement data, and the walking speed is stated to be up to 2 meters per second. The first step is to launch IRON in retail spaces, and then expand the tasks to operational scenarios.
Falling on stage, of course, looks awkward, but in a sense, this is the real test. The human-like gait impresses exactly as long as the robot does not stand still and does not start to lose in the most important competition, in the ability not to fall.
