Liu Fang, the person in charge of the product technology of Xiaomi Auto's autonomous driving, has left to start his own business and is laying out embodied intelligence. | Exclusive from 36Kr.

Text | Wang Fangyu

 Editor | Su Jianxun

36Kr exclusively learned that Liu Fang, the former product technology head of autonomous driving at Xiaomi Automobile, has resigned and founded a new company in September this year - Beijing Amio Robot Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Amio Robot"). However, the specific technical path and entrepreneurial plan have not yet been disclosed to the outside world.

It is understood that before leaving, Liu Fang served as the product technology head and mass production head of autonomous driving at Xiaomi Automobile, going through the entire process of the establishment, technical research and development, and mass production of the Xiaomi autonomous driving team.

Earlier, Liu Fang worked in the search business department of Google China. Later, he joined Xiaomi and was one of the earliest employees of Xiaomi, serving as the head of the Xiaomi MIUI Life Yellow Pages business.

Xiaomi Automobile has always attached great importance to the building of autonomous driving capabilities. In Lei Jun's words, "a huge amount of resources has been invested in this field". In August 2022, Lei Jun stated at the press conference that Xiaomi's autonomous driving aims to be "fully self-developed", and a team of 500 people has been formed, with the goal of entering the first echelon of the autonomous driving industry in 2024.

Intelligent driving and embodied intelligent robots have many commonalities in the technical principle: they are both based on the perception and interaction with the environment, and after calculating the external information, they guide the machine to move. According to Musk, a Tesla car is a robot with wheels.

Therefore, players who enter the embodied intelligence field from intelligent driving have certain technical advantages, and the existing know-how can be reused to a certain extent. An investor told 36Kr that this is the same reason that entrepreneurs who have done search have an advantage in starting a large-scale model business.

In the past year or more, under the domestic entrepreneurial upsurge of embodied intelligence, there are many practitioners with a background in intelligent driving who have started businesses in the field of embodied intelligence, and they have become a force that cannot be ignored in the industry.

For example, Zhang Li, the Chief Operating Officer of WeRide, has become the co-founder of the robot company Zhujidiandongli; Gao Jiyang, who once worked at Waymo and Momenta, founded the embodied intelligence company Xinghaitu; Chen Yilun, the former CTO of the Autonomous Driving System of Huawei Vehicle BU, has also devoted himself to embodied intelligence and founded Tashi Zhihang in July this year.

However, at the industrial landing level, embodied robots are much more complicated than autonomous driving. Taking the perception function as an example, the perception of autonomous driving is mainly used for the detection of vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians, but robots need to enter more open living and commercial scenarios.

Currently, the competition in the embodied intelligence track is becoming increasingly fierce, and the industry's threshold and barriers have been raised a lot. For the newly established start-up companies represented by Amio Robot, the entrepreneurial opportunity window is getting smaller. How to stand out from the fierce competition is the key challenge they face.