XPENG’s Iron humanoid robot walks off a new production line

2 min read•Sep 22, 2026•

XPENG says its Iron humanoid robot walked autonomously off a newly operational production line after assembly, first reported by Engadget. That factory milestone does not establish whether Iron can make it through a working day, and XPENG has not disclosed the line’s current output or how much testing had been done before the walk itself.

XPENG said over 80 percent of the line’s core processes are automated. It is adapting quality systems from its car business to make robots consistently as production increases, while chairman and CEO He Xiaopeng gave Iron a staff badge.

The autonomous exit demonstrates movement after assembly, while customer-facing performance remains to be established. XPENG plans to deploy robots in its stores and campuses first, with reception, guided tours and sales assistance among the planned roles.

Iron has 76 degrees of freedom across its body and 21 in each hand, referring to the independent ways it can move. XPENG says three Turing AI chips provide up to 2,250 trillion operations per second, letting Iron run its AI model onboard and perform complex tasks without a remote operator.

XPENG also says Iron’s outer structure was designed to be flexible with safety in mind. No independent safety evaluation is provided for that design, and the jobs remain planned while everyday performance is still to be established.

In April, Figure reported that it had produced over 350 Figure 03 robots and demonstrated a production cycle of one robot per hour. Those robots were allocated to uses including internal development and data collection, so the total should not be read as customer deliveries. BMW said an earlier Figure 02 inserted sheet-metal parts for welding at its Spartanburg plant and supported production of more than 30,000 BMW X3s over ten months.

Mass production is still a year-end goal, with deliveries in China and overseas markets planned for 2027. The announcement did not specify U.S. availability or a price.

Oct 7, 2026

Arizona appeals court vacates manslaughter sentence after AI video

An Arizona appeals court vacated the 10.5-year sentence of Gabriel Horcasitas while upholding his manslaughter conviction, first reported by Nytimes. The case returns to Maricopa County Superior Court for resentencing without the video, after judges found that it presented scripted statements as if the victim himself were speaking in court.

The three-judge panel said the video generated a likeness of Christopher Pelkey’s voice and appearance but did not reflect actual events. It found that allowing and relying on the video made the sentencing fundamentally unfair, and noted that no prior Arizona case had addressed the admissibility of such a depiction at sentencing.

The judges said a victim’s right to speak cannot override a defendant’s right to be sentenced on accurate, reliable information. They said the video collapsed the distinction between the family’s belief about what Pelkey would have said and Pelkey’s own voice and opinions.

The ruling distinguishes family members speaking about Pelkey from a generated likeness that appeared to speak for him.

Pelkey’s sister, Stacey Wales, presented the video during Horcasitas’s sentencing alongside victim-impact statements from family and friends. Wales wrote the script and said her husband and the couple’s longtime business partner helped create the video using Pelkey’s voice from a YouTube video and his face and torso from a funeral-service poster.

Judge Todd F. Lang praised the video as genuine, then imposed the maximum sentence of 10.5 years, more than the nine years prosecutors had sought.

Wales said nobody intended to make the court believe Pelkey was alive or that he had recorded the video before his death. She said she disagreed with the ruling and argued that families use slide shows, collages, hypothetical conversations and poetry to convey grief.

Wales compared the AI video with photography, saying it took 15 years of landmark cases around the 1860s before photography was widely accepted in courts.

The case returns to Maricopa County Superior Court for a new sentencing hearing without the AI-generated video.