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 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC). The announcements mark a significant step in moving embodied AI from laboratory research to industrial deployment.
Kairos 3.1 is designed as a natively unified model integrating 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, and evaluate outcomes for adjustment.
At the core of its spatial understanding is ACE-BRAIN-0.5, which has 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. If a failure occurs, it can identify the affected step and restart from that point.
The company also introduced Ambient Capture Engine 2.0, a human-centric system for capturing high-density physical-interaction data. This includes ACE Ego Kit, a lightweight wireless wearable with the ACE Sense Glove offering sensitivity of 0.01 newtons and joint-angle error below two degrees. The ACE Data Engine incorporates ACE-ViDiHand, a generative 4D hand-motion-capture framework that led three public benchmarks as of July 2026.
ACE ROBOTICS introduced three commercial solutions. Xiaoman, for instant retail, is paired with the W1 fulfillment robot, which has a robot-to-payload weight ratio under 2:1 and force-control precision within one newton. It has been deployed with customers including Sense MartGo, Kuaikeda and PetroChina convenience stores, with plans for 1,000 retail locations in the next year. Xiaoxin addresses hotel-laundry operations, handling collection, loading, unloading, washing, sorting and folding. Xiaotu is designed for autonomous outdoor operation using a “one brain, many bodies” architecture on quadruped robots.
The company also launched 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. ACE ROBOTICS announced strategic collaborations with the Caohejing Development Zone, PetroChina, Kuaikeda, and SenseTime Shanhui, as well as 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 demonstrations to sustained real-world operations.
