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 the company organized during the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, convened around the theme of advancing physical AI from 'understanding' to 'execution.'
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, 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. 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, which ACE ROBOTICS said 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. For physical generation and reasoning, Kairos-HomeWorld supports whole-home scene generation and object interaction, built on 300,000 residential floor plans, 5,000 simulated home environments and 8,700 3D assets covering six categories of physical properties.
In internal testing, the Kairos 3.1 8B model achieved an inference latency of 125 milliseconds on the NVIDIA Jetson Thor platform at BF16 precision. Its in-house KairosRT computing engine supports real-time, on-device inference.
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. Components include ACE Ego Kit (a lightweight wireless wearable with the ACE Sense Glove offering sensitivity of 0.01 newtons and a joint-angle error of less than two degrees), ACE Data Engine (an automated data-production platform incorporating ACE-ViDiHand, a generative 4D hand-motion-capture framework), and ACE Ego Matrix (which standardizes embodied data across four dimensions). ACE ROBOTICS has open-sourced the framework, which it says placed first on the RoboCase and RoboTwin leaderboards.
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. Xiaoman, its integrated fulfillment solution for instant retail, is paired with the new W1 fulfillment robot. The W1 has a robot-to-payload weight ratio of less than 2:1, force-control precision within one newton and a minimum required aisle width of 75 centimeters. 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 and expand to approximately 10,000 stores within two years.
Xiaoxin addresses hotel-laundry operations, where ACE ROBOTICS estimates that approximately 80% of demand occurs at night. The solution enables 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, applying a general-purpose intelligent brain across multiple quadruped robot platforms. It has been deployed in visitor-guidance and interactive experience services at cultural-tourism events, including the Begonia Flower Festival in Tianjin.
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 covering autonomous warehouse stores, front warehouses and unmanned retail environments. 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.
