ACE ROBOTICS today unveiled Kairos 3.1, its latest action-oriented world model, alongside Ambient Capture Engine 2.0 and three commercial solutions spanning instant retail, hospitality and outdoor service scenarios at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) 2026. The announcements represent a major advance in connecting high-density data with real-world robotic operations, addressing the challenge of moving physical AI from understanding to execution.
The forum, organized by ACE ROBOTICS around the theme of advancing physical AI from "understanding" to "execution," brought together economists, technology executives and embodied AI researchers. It also marked the launch of PHYSICAL IQ, a unified benchmark for embodied physical intelligence, jointly initiated by the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Association, the Shenzhen Loop Area Institute and the East China branch of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, with participation from more than 20 universities and industry partners.
Kairos 3.1 is designed as a natively unified model that integrates generative, physical and cognitive intelligence within a single architecture. Built on a hybrid Transformer architecture with a shared mixed-attention mechanism, it brings visual observations, language instructions, force and tactile signals, and policy trajectories into a unified latent space. This supports an "understand, reason, execute and reflect" loop, enabling robots to break down long-horizon tasks, simulate physical cause and effect, rank candidate actions, execute strategies and evaluate outcomes for further adjustment.
At the core of its spatial understanding is ACE-BRAIN-0.5, which achieved state-of-the-art results across 12 public evaluations covering spatial understanding, navigation, manipulation and task-progress assessment. In a household laundry scenario, a robot can identify spatial relationships, divide a task into more than a dozen steps and verify each stage in real time, with the ability to recover from failures without restarting the entire task.
ACE ROBOTICS also introduced the "Information-Density Law" for embodied models, classifying embodied data across five levels (L1 to L5). Ambient Capture Engine 2.0 captures, processes and reuses high-density physical-interaction data, featuring the ACE Sense Glove with sensitivity of 0.01 newtons and joint-angle error of less than two degrees. The company open-sourced the ACE Ego Matrix framework, which placed first on the RoboCase and RoboTwin leaderboards.
Three commercial solutions were introduced: Xiaoman for instant retail with the W1 fulfillment robot, Xiaoxin for hotel-laundry operations, and Xiaotu for autonomous outdoor service using a "one brain, many bodies" architecture. The W1 robot has a robot-to-payload weight ratio of less than 2:1 and force-control precision within one newton. ACE ROBOTICS plans to deploy the Xiaoman solution across 1,000 retail locations over the next year and expand to approximately 10,000 stores within two years.
ACE ROBOTICS also announced strategic collaborations with the Caohejing Development Zone, PetroChina, Kuaikeda and SenseTime Shanhui, and launched the World Model Cloud Ecosystem initiative with Baidu AI Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Tencent Cloud and SenseCore AI Cloud. These partnerships aim to support the computing requirements of world-model development and accelerate the transition of embodied AI from individual demonstrations to sustained operations in real-world environments.
