Who is leading XPeng Robotics: The four key figures behind IRON
The XPeng robot "IRON", which became an instant sensation at the press conference and whose quirky gait once made thousands question if it was "operated by a human inside", beneath its "outer shell" —
What kind of team is behind it?
Although it's impossible to cover everything, after in - depth research, QbitAI found that:
Among the core figures leading XPeng's robot business today, the most well - known to the public, there are about four.
And the resumes of these four bigwigs are also shining all the way —
Who is leading XPeng's robot project?
Mi Liangchuan
Mi Liangchuan is currently the vice - president of XPeng's automotive robot division and the head of the AI Technology Committee. He is undoubtedly the "number one person" of XPeng's robot project.
The reason is that he is responsible for coordinating the technical route, organizational structure, and product implementation of the humanoid robot project — he is involved in almost every key link.
Recently, in an interview with Robox, Mi Liangchuan pointed out that IRON's amazing performance is inseparable from its unique waist design.
The new - generation IRON actually has a "spine" rather than a traditional "waist".
Specifically, the team once again got inspiration from the biological structure of humans. Everything, from the spine, to the muscle groups, to the abdominal cavity, and even the outermost skin, is designed to mimic humans.
Of course, it may sound reasonable, but the actual training process is extremely difficult.
In fact, just eight months ago, IRON didn't have the super - mimetic cat - woman gait like it did at the press conference. This ability almost emerged overnight in March.
One night in March, IRON suddenly became very human - like when walking backwards. This was a turning point for our generative controller, but I can't exactly say which optimization brought about this change. I can only say that when the data and computing power reached a certain level, a leap was achieved.
Mi Liangchuan sighed in the interview that although it seemed to emerge overnight, the XPeng team had made great efforts, and fortunately, the actual effect far exceeded expectations.
In addition to the waist, the forefoot of IRON also has increased degrees of freedom, combined with the self - developed generative controller.
Mi Liangchuan's relationship with XPeng Motors began in 2021 when he became the senior director of autonomous driving.
During this period, he led the team to participate in the algorithm and architecture construction of the assisted driving system, laying a key foundation for XPeng's autonomous driving capabilities.
Two years later, Mi Liangchuan was promoted to the person in charge of enterprise processes.
What really brought him into the spotlight was XPeng Motors' humanoid robot project "IRON" that started in 2023.
In September 2023, Mi Liangchuan took the position of the head of XPeng's robot division, comprehensively coordinating product R & D, algorithm platform, and implementation tests.
After that, he further became the chairman of XPeng's AI Technology Committee and was promoted to the vice - president of the company, officially becoming one of the core figures of XPeng's intelligent strategy.
So far, Mi Liangchuan has been with XPeng for nearly five years.
In 1999, Mi Liangchuan was admitted to the University of Science and Technology of China, belonging to Class 9923. He majored in electrical engineering, and his research direction was high - speed data acquisition systems.
After graduating from his undergraduate program, Mi Liangchuan chose to further his studies in the United States. He pursued a master's degree in robotics at Iowa State University, focusing on 2D and 3D geometric fitting and dynamic control.
During his postgraduate studies, he also worked as an electrical engineer at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. He developed an obstacle - avoidance system for medical service robots and designed a laser navigation scheme for drones.
In August 2005, just after graduating with his master's degree, Mi Liangchuan received an offer from NVIDIA.
However, at that time, he probably didn't expect that he would stay there for a full ten years.
Initially, he worked as a software engineer, responsible for OpenGL graphics development on the Macintosh platform, as well as the adaptation and debugging of the new - generation GPU on the Mac system.
During that period, he was deeply involved in core technical work such as GPU underlying drivers, graphics rendering, and system transplantation, laying a solid foundation for NVIDIA's graphics ecosystem.
Two years later, he was promoted to a senior software engineer, leading the simulation and system transplantation of multiple generations of GPUs and promoting the implementation of the Tegra SoC platform in graphics and stereoscopic display.
During this period, he designed and implemented the OTA cloud architecture for Tegra products, which later became an important underlying component of NVIDIA's DRIVE autonomous driving platform.
In 2013, he was further promoted to a senior software engineering manager, responsible for coordinating five Android software teams in the United States and China, coordinating cross - border R & D, promoting technical integration, and talent expansion.
In 2015, Mi Liangchuan ended his ten - year career at NVIDIA and returned to China to co - found Miwen Dynamics and served as the chief technology officer.
This startup company was initially positioned as a service provider for robot and drone control platforms, and Mi Liangchuan was responsible for the overall engineering design.
However, this entrepreneurial experience only lasted for one year.
In 2016, Mi Liangchuan returned to NVIDIA and continued to focus on autonomous driving and AI.
Although he left Miwen Dynamics, soon, he re - established a connection between NVIDIA and Miwen Dynamics.
Around 2017, NVIDIA's Jetson platform entered the commercial promotion stage, and Miwen Dynamics became its ecological partner at this point, starting to provide edge computing solutions based on NVIDIA Jetson.
Since then, the cooperation between the two sides has become closer, and Miwen Dynamics has now become one of NVIDIA's important ecological enterprises.
Okay, let's get back to Mi Liangchuan's renewed journey at NVIDIA.
Since 2016, he has been involved in NVIDIA's autonomous driving division, successively serving as a senior deep - learning engineer and an autonomous driving engineering manager, focusing on core technical directions such as model inference optimization, system performance, and automatic parking.
However, after less than five years back at NVIDIA, Mi Liangchuan left the company that had accompanied his growth for nearly 15 years again.
But this time, it wasn't a short - term farewell.
After learning about the number one person behind IRON, let's see who else Mr. He Xiaopeng has arranged in Mi Liangchuan's team —
Chen Jie
Chen Jie, a new core member of XPeng's robot team, officially joined XPeng's robot team in mid - July 2025, responsible for reinforcement learning.
According to AI Technology Review, before joining XPeng, Chen Jie had contacted several domestic embodied intelligence companies. He finally chose XPeng mainly for two reasons:
First, XPeng started early in the R & D of robot bodies and has certain technical accumulations.
More importantly, XPeng has been selling cars well recently. It currently has nearly 50 billion RMB in its account, so there must be enough R & D funds.
It's worth noting that Chen Jie is a well - recognized expert in embodied intelligence in the industry. Before joining XPeng, he was the person in charge of reinforcement learning at ByteDance's Seed team.
Chen Jie graduated from The University of Hong Kong for his undergraduate studies and then pursued a doctoral degree at Harvard University, focusing on AI and reinforcement learning.
After graduating with his doctorate, he worked at the autonomous driving unicorn Momenta.
Ge Yixiao
Ge Yixiao —
She is the founding director and chief researcher of XPeng's newly established Intelligent Mimetic Department.
Ge Yixiao graduated from Huazhong University of Science and Technology with a major in engineering and then pursued a doctorate at The Chinese University of Hong Kong's MMLab.
It is reported that her main research direction is multimodality. She has led several open - source projects, published dozens of top - conference papers, and has a good influence in the academic circle.
So far, Ge Yixiao's Google Scholar citation count has exceeded 10,000.
After graduating with her doctorate, Ge Yixiao joined Tencent's ARC Lab as a chief researcher. She was promoted to a T12 technical expert at Tencent at the age of 28 and won the technology breakthrough award issued by Tencent for two consecutive years.
Liu Xianming
Actually, behind IRON, in addition to XPeng's robot team, the efforts of XPeng's autonomous driving department are also indispensable.
According to Robox, Liu Xianming, the person in charge of XPeng's autonomous driving, is leading his team to fully assist in the R & D of XPeng's robot.
Currently, Liu Xianming's team is trying to remove the translation part from Vision to Language in VLA to reduce information loss and speed up inference.
Liu Xianming pointed out that the biggest problem with traditional VLA is that it uses discrete language to connect images, and a large amount of information is lost in this process. As a result, the cost of obtaining training data increases, and large - scale training cannot be carried out.
The second - generation VLA they proposed aims to remove the language as an intermediate layer and directly align vision and semantics, which makes self - supervised training possible and is therefore easier to scale.
Liu Xianming obtained a doctorate in computer science from Harbin Institute of Technology and a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign. His research directions cover deep learning and computer vision.
Previously, he also studied computer science as a visiting student at Tsinghua University and the University of Texas at San Antonio.
In addition to universities, he has also worked at top R & D institutions such as Microsoft Research Asia, Baidu IDL, Adobe, and Facebook, engaging in cutting - edge topics such as visual perception, deep learning, and satellite image computing.
At Facebook's Connectivity Lab, he led his team to generate a global population density distribution dataset from high - resolution satellite images using computer vision.
After that, Liu Xianming joined Horizon Robotics and served as the R & D director of the Applied AI Lab, focusing on embedded AI and the implementation of perception algorithms.
From 2020, he worked at Cruise for four years, leading research in the directions of detection, segmentation, and new sensors, and promoting the performance optimization of autonomous driving perception systems.
Liu Xianming said that these four years were very fulfilling and wonderful.
In March 2024, he joined XPeng Motors and served as the head of the AI team.
IRON's journey so far
In fact, XPeng has had a deep talent accumulation in the field of embodied intelligence from the very beginning.
In the autumn of 2020, He Xiaopeng went to Shenzhen himself to acquire a startup company focusing on robot dog R & D — Duogou Robotics.
This company was one of the first teams in China to achieve the implementation of quadruped robot technology. Led by the founder, Zhao Tongyang, they completed the R & D of the first - generation robot dog in less than two months.
As for why an automobile company would acquire a seemingly unrelated quadruped robot company in an environment where embodied intelligence was not yet well - developed at that time, it was due to He Xiaopeng's keen intuition.
At that time, XPeng Motors' main business had just turned a profit, and it was just a few months away from its IPO.
But He Xiaopeng didn't just focus on the joy. Instead, he began to think about the second and third growth curves beyond automobiles —
One was flying cars; the other was quadruped robots in the direction of embodied intelligence.
So, he extended an olive branch to Zhao Tongyang.
Soon after, XPeng officially acquired Duogou Robotics and co - founded "XPeng Robotics" with Zhao Tongyang. This became the starting point of XPeng's robot business.
However, at that time, the robot business was still in its infancy and was a money - burning stage.
A considerable part of the funds was invested in the talent war.
It is reported that in the early days of XPeng Robotics, the company once offered a top - level annual salary of