While Tesla struggles shake off allegations of remote operation for its robots, CATL is putting its new “Moz” humanoid robots to work — the company says it’s got the world’s first large-scale implementation of humanoid robots working at their Zhongzhou battery pack facility in China.
According to reports in CarNewsChina and South China Morning Post, Chinese battery powerhouse CATL has deployed a number of Moz robots to its End of Line (EOL) and Direct Current Resistance (DCR) testing process sections of its battery pack assembly line — are critical functions for the company as its battery packs are prepped for final shipment to the company’s list of OEM customers.
And, yes: that’s a list that includes Tesla!
“Moz has become an indispensable member of our production line,” CATL stated. “Beyond its primary tasks, it autonomously detects wire harness connection status, reports anomalies immediately to reduce defect rates, and proactively switches to inspection mode between operations.”
These processes previously required human workers to precisely connect test plugs carrying hundreds of volts to specific locations on battery packs, creating high-voltage spark risks and inconsistencies in efficiency and quality.
The robots themselves were developed by Chinese startup Spirit AI. Properly called Xiaomo, the “Moz” robots are powered by CATL batteries that send electrons to a series of motors, servos, sensors, and processors to deliver what the company calls a ” Vision-Language-Action model of artificial intelligence” that enables the robots to recognize changes in their environments (ex.: plug in the wrong position, a connection that’s an off color, or a box/tool left in the wrong place), while their dexterous hands enable them to perform what have traditionally been manual tasks that were considered safety and security risks for CATL’s human workers.
While it’s been less than a week since the CATL robots have seen wide-scale deployment, early results seem to indicate they’re doing a good job:
Apart from achieving a 99 per cent success rate at its plug-in task on CATL’s factory floor, Xiaomo’s daily workload was also triple that of a human worker because these machines work without any breaks, according to the company.
The latest push for humanoid factory workers from CATL seems to underscore the demand for more humanoid automation in China’s red-hot and ultra-efficient manufacturing industry, which is already becoming somewhat infamous for the proliferation of “dark factories” that operate without any humans at all. Whether a similar push will displace human workers in Western countries that operate under different interpretations of monetary theory and with different social safety nets in place remains to be seen.
You can watch Moz do some other robot stuff in this demo video, from Spirit AI, below, then let us know what you think of CATL’s apparent vote of confidence in humanoid robot tech (and what, if anything, it means for Tesla’s “$25 trillion” Optimus market) in the comments.
Spirit AI humanoid robot
SOURCES: source links throughout; featured image by CATL.
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