With a bionic spine, artificial muscles and flexible skin, the Next-Gen IRON resembles a human being: developed by Chinese high-tech company XPENG and unveiled to the world for the first time at XPENG AI Day last November, the robot has 82 degrees of freedom. These enable it to walk and stand like a human being. This allows IRON 2.0 – which is available in both female and male forms – to stride elegantly down the catwalk like a model and perform a wide range of anthropomorphic movements. The 22 degrees of freedom in its hands and fingers enable complex movements such as grasping and balancing.

The robot is 1.73 metres tall and weighs 65 kilograms. Thanks to its ‘single skeleton, multiple forms’ architecture and lattice-like structure, the next-generation XPENG humanoid robot is flexibly adaptable: it can be configured with different body types and genders, enabling different appearances and application scenarios. Structurally, the focus is on a highly anthropomorphic configuration and system integration of the robot, complemented by visual details such as the bionic spine structure and human-like shoulder blade and forefoot. The head of IRON 2.0 consists of an integrated 3D curved display that can dynamically express different emotions, thereby improving communication.

The next-gen IRON uses three Turing AI chips with a total computing power of 3,000 trillion operations per second (TOPS) – currently the highest global standard. Combined with the company's proprietary AI operating system XPENG VLA 2.0 (VLA: Vision-Language-Action) and other models (VLT/VLM), developed in-house, conversation, movement and interaction are intelligently linked. The next-generation XPENG humanoid robot integrates these innovations to achieve synergistic advances in motion performance, body adaptability and human-robot interaction, creating a seamless mobility solution.

IRON 2.0 was developed by the XPENG Robotics Centre, founded in 2020. It comprises research and development centres in the Chinese cities of Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai, as well as in Silicon Valley in the United States. The goal is to establish a long-term, systematic technical framework focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The team consists of top-class scientists from renowned universities around the world with diverse technical backgrounds, more than 60 per cent of whom hold master's or doctoral degrees. The research covers robotics, artificial intelligence, large models, intelligent manufacturing and systems engineering, and continuously drives the exploration of frontiers in embodied intelligence, general cognition and autonomous decision-making systems.

With the help of intelligent agents that understand, learn and act accordingly in the real world, XPENG Robotics aims to bridge the critical gap between core algorithms and system architecture on the one hand and technical verification on the other. The goal is to advance general intelligence from theoretical research to verifiable, scalable applications in the real world.

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