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) in Shanghai.
The announcements were made at a forum ACE ROBOTICS organized during WAIC, 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, rather than combining separately developed capabilities. 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. The model can break down long-horizon tasks, simulate physical cause and effect across multiple scenarios, rank candidate actions, execute the selected strategy and evaluate the outcome for further adjustment.
At the core of its spatial understanding is ACE-BRAIN-0.5. ACE ROBOTICS said it has achieved state-of-the-art results across 12 public evaluations covering spatial understanding, navigation, manipulation and task-progress assessment, among publicly reported models as of July 2026.
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.
ACE ROBOTICS also announced the open release of ACE-Data-0, an L5 household-interaction dataset featuring complex physical tasks and high-precision annotations.
Building on its data infrastructure and Kairos world-model capabilities, ACE ROBOTICS introduced three standardized industry solutions designed for deployment within existing commercial workflows. Xiaoman, its integrated fulfillment solution for instant retail, is paired with the new W1 fulfillment robot. The solution connects robot hardware, world-model capabilities, motion control, product information, warehouse locations and order management. It has been deployed with customers including Sense MartGo, Kuaikeda and PetroChina convenience stores.
Xiaoxin addresses hotel-laundry operations, enabling robots to handle collection, loading, unloading, washing, sorting and folding, with ironing capabilities planned for future versions. 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, including a strategic collaboration with the Caohejing Development Zone and 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.
