ACE ROBOTICS Unveils Kairos 3.1 and Expands Embodied AI Stack at WAIC 2026

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. The announcements were made at a forum ACE ROBOTICS organized during the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, convened around the theme of advancing physical AI from 'understanding' to 'execution.' The event brought together economists, technology executives and embodied AI researchers to examine how general-purpose world models can move from laboratory research to industrial deployment.

The forum also marked the launch of PHYSICAL IQ, a unified benchmark for embodied physical intelligence. It was 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. Thomas J. Sargent, Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences, discussed the limitations of current intelligent systems in rare and previously unseen situations.

'In the digital world, a model error may result in a flawed image or paragraph. In the physical world, an incorrect action can have real consequences,' said Wang Xiaogang, Chairman of ACE ROBOTICS. 'Kairos 3.1 is built around a first-principles approach to embodied world models, helping robots act more reliably in complex and uncertain environments, and accelerating the arrival of physical AI's Kairos moment.'

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. At the core of its spatial understanding is ACE-BRAIN-0.5, which ACE ROBOTICS said has achieved state-of-the-art results across 12 public evaluations covering spatial understanding, navigation, manipulation and task-progress assessment.

ACE ROBOTICS also introduced what it calls the 'Information-Density Law' for embodied models: the value of data is determined not only by its volume, but by whether it contains information capable of changing the outcome of an agent's actions. Built on this principle, Ambient Capture Engine 2.0 is a human-centric system for capturing, processing and reusing high-density physical-interaction data. It includes ACE Ego Kit, a lightweight wireless wearable comprising head, hand and chest components, and ACE Data Engine, an automated data-production platform for continuous, high-precision annotation of long-horizon tasks.

Building on its data infrastructure and Kairos world-model capabilities, ACE ROBOTICS introduced three standardized industry solutions. Xiaoman, its integrated fulfillment solution for instant retail, is paired with the new W1 fulfillment robot, which has a robot-to-payload weight ratio of less than 2:1 and force-control precision within one newton. It has been deployed with customers including Sense MartGo, Kuaikeda and PetroChina convenience stores. ACE ROBOTICS plans to deploy the solution across 1,000 retail locations over the next year. Xiaoxin addresses hotel-laundry operations, while Xiaotu is designed for autonomous operation in complex outdoor environments using a 'one brain, many bodies' architecture.

ACE ROBOTICS also announced a series of partnerships spanning infrastructure, computing and commercial deployment. The company entered into a strategic collaboration with the Caohejing Development Zone to develop an embodied AI innovation platform. In retail and fulfillment, ACE ROBOTICS announced collaborations with PetroChina, Kuaikeda and SenseTime Shanhui. To support the computing requirements of world-model development, ACE ROBOTICS launched the World Model Cloud Ecosystem initiative with Baidu AI Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Tencent Cloud and SenseCore AI Cloud.

By connecting high-density data, unified world models, robot platforms, commercial applications and shared evaluation standards, ACE ROBOTICS aims to support the transition of embodied AI from individual technical demonstrations to sustained operations in real-world environments.