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 organized by ACE ROBOTICS during the conference, which was 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, 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.
'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, enabling the model to break down long-horizon tasks, simulate physical cause and effect, rank candidate actions, and execute strategies with self-reflection.
At the core of its spatial understanding is ACE-BRAIN-0.5, which ACE ROBOTICS said achieved state-of-the-art results across 12 public evaluations covering spatial understanding, navigation, manipulation and task-progress assessment. Kairos-HomeWorld supports whole-home scene generation and object interaction, built on 300,000 residential floor plans and 5,000 simulated home environments.
ACE ROBOTICS also introduced the 'Information-Density Law' for embodied models, classifying embodied data across five levels from L1 to L5. Ambient Capture Engine 2.0 is a human-centric system for capturing high-density physical-interaction data, including the ACE Ego Kit wearable with the ACE Sense Glove offering 0.01 newton sensitivity. The company open-sourced the ACE Ego Matrix framework for standardizing embodied data.
Three commercial solutions were introduced: Xiaoman for instant retail with the W1 fulfillment robot, deployed with customers including Sense MartGo, Kuaikeda and PetroChina convenience stores; Xiaoxin for hotel-laundry operations; and Xiaotu for autonomous outdoor service using a 'one brain, many bodies' architecture across quadruped robots, already deployed at the Begonia Flower Festival in Tianjin.
ACE ROBOTICS also announced partnerships 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. 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.
