WUHU, China: Chery Aimoga Robotics' research and development team hit a major milestone recently - its humanoid robot, Mornine, successfully performed an autonomous car door opening task.
The feat was recently performed in a Chery dealership — using only onboard sensors, full-body motion control, and end-to-end reinforcement learning.
Rather than being programmed to recognise handles, the robot learned this through reinforcement learning: over millions of simulation cycles, the model independently learned to focus on the correct region and execute the task.
"We never explicitly told the robot what a door handle is," said the engineering team. "It learned to focus on that region by itself."
"Opening a car door may seem simple," the company noted, "but in robotics, it marks a shift: from simulation to service, from command to capability."
Unlike traditional scripted robots or teleoperated systems, Mornine completes the task without human intervention.
The robot identifies the door handle, adjusts her posture, and pulls open the door using coordinated force across her arms, waist, and legs.
Mornine manages to open a car door.
The deployment marks one of the first instances of a service robot executing such a high-friction, physical interaction in a live commercial setting.
Mornine's sensor stack includes 3D LiDAR, depth and wide-angle cameras, and a visual-language model (VLM), allowing her to perceive door position and opening status in real time.
After simulation training, the learned model was deployed via Sim2Real methods.
Mornine continues collecting live sensor data, which feeds back into the cloud training loop for ongoing improvement — enabling a continuous learning cycle in real deployments.
Mornine is currently operating in several Chery 4S dealerships in China.
Beyond opening car doors, she assists in customer greeting, vehicle introduction, and item delivery.
Her ability to handle physical tasks like door opening further supports AiMOGA's vision of humanoid robots working alongside humans in real-world retail environments.
Chinese car maker Chery sees robots as a potential revenue stream in the future.
Earlier this year, Chery delivered the first batch of robots to its dealers globally.
One robot was allocated to a Malaysian dealer.
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