Article URL: https://robotics.xiaomi.com/xiaomi-robotics-1.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48974454 Points: 323 # Comments: 219

Breaking the data barrier. Scaling robot policy models with embodiment-free pre-training. Foundation models in language and vision keep moving the frontier by riding empirical scaling laws: capability tracks data, parameters, and compute. Robotics has missed out. Large-scale, high-quality data is hard to come by, and that scarcity, more than anything else, has capped how far policy models could scale. What robots can do under genuinely large-scale training remained largely an open question. We take a step toward answering it. Xiaomi-Robotics-1 combines large-scale embodiment-free (UMI) pre-training with a modest amount of real-robot data in a post-training stage. We study how the model behaves as it scales. Everything Xiaomi-Robotics-1 can do starts from data. For pre-training, we use 100,000 hours of embodiment-free (UMI) trajectories spanning more than 1,700 scenarios (household, commercial premises, industrial sites, and outdoor spaces), covering a diverse range of tasks. We develop a scalable auto-labeling pipeline that first divides trajectories into fixed-length segments and then annotates each segment with language descriptions of scene state transitions. For post-training, we leverage cross-embodiment datasets containing in-house robot data, filtered open-sourced robot data, and a set of high-quality UMI data. For the in-house data, we collected over 7,200 hours of real-robot data in real homes, covering tasks like tidying a sofa, sorting a shoe cabinet, and putting away kitchenware. The UMI data are manually annotated with temporal segments and instruction prompts, which differ from the auto-labeled state-transition descriptions used in the pre-training data. Following the training paradigm of LLMs, the training of Xiaomi-Robotics-1 consists of two stages: pre-training and post-training. The first stage learns general representations for action generation from large-scale UMI data, while the post-training stage aligns the model with real robot embodiments and instruction-following capabilities. Pre-training is about breadth: exposing the model to as much of the real world as possible. We use the embodiment-free UMI data described above, which spans a broad range of environments and tasks. At this scale, manual labeling is infeasible. Thus, we built an automatic annotation pipeline powered by a strong vision-language model. Long videos are split into fixed-length clips, and the VLM describes the state transition of grippers and interacting objects within each clip. The result is a large-scale corpus of real-world manipulation trajectories, each annotated with precise language descriptions. These allow the model to learn action generation that drives the scene toward the state transitions described by the language. An encouraging finding is that pre-training shows a clean scaling behavior: as data and model size grow, validation action error steadily decreases. Post-training aims to align the strong action-generation capabilities acquired from pre-training with real robot embodiments and natural-language instruction following along two axes. Embodiment alignment uses high-quality cross-embodiment real-robot data to map the general action-generation ability onto actual robots. Instruction alignment shifts the model from "generating actions given a description of scene state transitions" to "understanding a natural-language instruction and executing it directly."