Joe Cool

Falcon Heavy's two side boosters returned to Earth and landed at Landing Zones 2 and 40

🦿Xpeng showed a humanoid robot called IRON whose movement looked so human that the team literally cut it open on stage to prove it is a machine. IRON uses a bionic body with a flexible spine, synthetic muscles, and soft skin so joints and torso can twist smoothly like a person. The system has 82 degrees of freedom in total with 22 in each hand for fine finger control. Compute runs on 3 custom AI chips rated at 2,250 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second), which is far above typical laptop neural accelerators, so it can handle vision and motion planning on the robot. The AI stack focuses on turning camera input directly into body movement without routing through text, which reduces lag and makes the gait look natural. Xpeng staged the cut-open demo at AI Day in Guangzhou this week, addressing rumors that a performer was inside by exposing internal actuators, wiring, and cooling. Company materials also mention a large physical-world model and a multi-brain control setup for dialogue, perception, and locomotion, hinting at a path from stage demos to service work. Production is targeted for 2026, so near-term tasks will be limited, but the hardware shows a serious step toward human-scale manipulation.