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 in Shanghai. The announcements mark a significant step in moving embodied AI from research to real-world deployment, addressing the critical challenge of making robots reliable in complex, uncertain environments.
The company introduced what it calls the “Information-Density Law” for embodied models, arguing that data value is determined not just by volume but by its ability to change an agent’s actions. This principle underpins Ambient Capture Engine 2.0, a human-centric system for capturing high-density physical-interaction data. The system includes the ACE Ego Kit, a lightweight wireless wearable with the ACE Sense Glove offering 0.01-newton sensitivity and sub-two-degree joint-angle error, synchronizing data from over 20 heterogeneous sensors with less than one millisecond timing error.
Kairos 3.1 is built as a natively unified model integrating generative, physical and cognitive intelligence within a single architecture. It uses a hybrid Transformer with shared mixed-attention mechanism to bring 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 actions, execute and adjust. In a household laundry scenario, a robot can identify spatial relationships, divide tasks into over a dozen steps, verify each stage, and restart from a failure point rather than repeating the entire task.
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, with participation from over 20 universities and industry partners. This benchmark aims to standardize evaluation across the field.
Three commercial solutions were introduced: Xiaoman for instant retail paired with the W1 fulfillment robot, which has a robot-to-payload weight ratio under 2:1 and force-control precision within one newton, suitable for high-density shelving. It has been deployed with customers including Sense MartGo, Kuaikeda and PetroChina convenience stores, with plans to deploy across 1,000 retail locations in the next year and expand to approximately 10,000 stores within two years. Xiaoxin addresses hotel laundry operations, where about 80% of demand occurs at night, aiming to reduce night-shift staffing pressure. Xiaotu is designed for outdoor environments, using a “one brain, many bodies” architecture across multiple quadruped robot platforms, deployed in visitor-guidance services at events like the Begonia Flower Festival in Tianjin.
ACE ROBOTICS also announced strategic collaborations with the Caohejing Development Zone for an embodied AI innovation platform, and partnerships with PetroChina, Kuaikeda and SenseTime Shanhui for retail and fulfillment. To support computing needs, the company launched the World Model Cloud Ecosystem initiative with Baidu AI Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Tencent Cloud and SenseCore AI Cloud. The company has open-sourced the ACE Ego Matrix framework for standardizing embodied data and released the ACE-Data-0 L5 household-interaction dataset.
Thomas J. Sargent, Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences, discussed limitations of current intelligent systems in rare and previously unseen situations during the forum. Wang Xiaogang, Chairman of ACE ROBOTICS, emphasized that in the physical world, incorrect actions can have real consequences, and Kairos 3.1 aims to help robots act more reliably, accelerating physical AI’s “Kairos moment.”
