At this point, most of the world’s major auto manufacturers are investing in humanoid robotics in one way or another.
For the most part, the focus so far has been on industrial applications. As vehicle factories have become highly automated, the number of people working in dealerships and service centers today greatly outnumber the production floor. There’s growing interest in automating customer-facing roles.
With that in mind, China’s largest exporter of passenger cars is entering the emerging humanoid robotics market with a radical approach. Instead of helping build vehicles, a new DeepSeek-powered android is engineered to sell them.
Can a robot that can read your emotions, access encyclopedic knowledge, and draw on lifetimes of virtual training outperform humans in sales?
Chery Automobile has expanded into robotics with its humanoid robot, Mornine. The Chinese automaker developed the bipedal robot in partnership with tech company Aimoga. Chery aims to be among the first automotive manufacturers to actually commercialize humanoids. The companies have developed a robotic dog named Argos in parallel.
First introduced at a 2024 company conference, Mornine features a futuristic human-like, feminine aesthetic. It’s intended to serve in roles such as automotive sales assistant, shopping guide, bookshop assistant, and caregiver. Standing 166 centimeters, Mornine’s face is made from soft silicone that can simulate human facial expressions and movements.
The robot can stand and walk upright, wave to greet people, and perform basic gestures. Mornine is equipped with dexterous hands for grasping objects or operating interfaces as needed. Internally, Mornine is outfitted with an array of sensors and actuators to support balance, navigation, and interaction.
Mornine is notable for combining human like facial expressions and bipedal locomotion. Walking on two legs is complex for robots as it requires real-time balance, sensor fusion, and precise joint control. Modern humanoid robots typically focus on replicating human aesthetics and facial movements or advanced walking and task execution.
Bipedal locomotion and expressive faces each require completely different hardware, control systems, and AI. Most projects are forced to prioritize one over the other due to limited resources and computational power. Walking on two legs means constantly adjusting balance in real-time. Small shifts from head or facial movements can throw off balance if not precisely calculated.
Achieving human-like expressions requires multiple actuators in small spaces like the lips, eyebrows, and cheeks. These all add weight and complexity to the robot’s skull, which affects balance.
However, it’s getting easier to combine uncanny facial expressions and bipedal walking. Modern actuators are getting more compact, efficient, and precise. AI is getting better at multitasking, so a robot can read emotions and generate speech while maintaining balance, while cloud-connected language models allow for more realistic conversations without bulky local processors.
Contemporary humanoid robots use modular architectures where the face, limbs, and control systems are separated buy synced through shared AI models. The separation helps scale complexity without system overload.
According to the automaker, the robot can accurately comprehend human speech, including the intent behind words. The robot converts commands into actions and spoken replies in real-time, suiting it for roles in customer service and sales.
Chery says the humanoid’s AI is tuned with industry-specific language models. This way, the robot can expertly discuss in a showroom or draw from other domain knowledge depending on its deployment.
Chery partnered with DeepSeek to create a robust cloud-based AI ecosystem based on the Chinese startup’s open-source large-model frameworks. DeepSeek essentially functions as the brains behind speech recognition, language understanding, and dialogue generation.
“While tech giants worldwide compete for AI computing dominance, the Chery Aimoga robotics team quickly recognized DeepSeek’s key advantage: its training costs are a mere US$5.57 million, one-tenth of OpenAI’s,” the company said in a recent press release. “Powered by NVIDIA H800 chips, DeepSeek offers complete transparency in model weights and training logs under the MIT open-source protocol.”
Chery says Mornine can continuously improve its conversational accuracy and even add new languages or skills via cloud updates with the setup. The company has emphasized the robot’s ability to learn different accents and conversational styles.
Mornine embodies Chery’s broader ecosystem called Chery Lion, an initiative that began in 2018 to integrate AI into all the company’s offerings. It’s part of a broader R&D program initiated back in 2020, when the automaker set up a dedicated humanoid robot project.
Chery’s luxury and international branches, like EXEED and Omada, have showcased the robot at events.
The company is rolling out Mornine’s capabilities in three phases:
- In the first phase, the robot serves as an information provider, focused on talking with users, answering questions, and learning from interactions.
- Phase 2 will expand on the core functionality to include physical assistance using improved vision and autonomous navigation.
- The third and final phase envisions Mornine as a competent personal assistant capable of complex household tasks and caregiving duties
According to reports, Chery plans to begin selling humanoid robots in overseas markets in 2025, initially focusing on car showroom assistants. Target markets likely include regions where Chery’s vehicles area popular throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and potentially Europe where the Omoda brand is expanding.
China’s major automotive manufacturers are increasingly investing in humanoid robotics. Leju Robot says it’s delivered 100 of its Kuavo humanoid robots to Beijing Automotive (BAIC) as well as FAW Honqi. Their robots can transfer skills to each other so fleets can work together efficiently on different tasks.
Leading Chinese robotics firm UBTECH recently shared footage of a large fleet of its industrial humanoids performing a wide range of tasks at Zeekr’s smart automotive factory. The Shenzhen-based company said the Walker S1 robots work together as an “intelligent swarm” using its self-developed BrainNet AI system. According to UBTECH, the robots self-organize and distribute tasks without needing human involvement.
Meanwhile in South Korea, Hyundai Motor Group plans to purchase tens of thousands of robots from its subsidiary, Boston Dynamics, over the next few years. The automaker says it’s part of its ongoing efforts enhancing its manufacturing processes. Hyundai plans to integrate the Massachusetts-based robotics leader’s humanoid, Atlas, into its factory operations.
The manufacturer already uses Spot quadruped robots for industrial inspections and predictive maintenance. The push into robotics is part of a broader commitment to invest $21 billion in the United States, with $6 billion allocated to drive innovation and expand partnerships with American companies.