ACE Robotics

大晓机器人

ACE Robotics is a Shanghai embodied-AI company, founded in July 2025, that develops world models, human-centric data-collection systems and a robot brain module intended to run on robot bodies made by other manufacturers. Its chairman is Wang Xiaogang, a co-founder and executive director of SenseTime, and its chief scientist is Tao Dacheng, an academician of the Australian Academy of Science who previously led JD Explore Academy and served as chief AI scientist at UBTech. The research team draws on scientists from Nanyang Technological University, the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, including members of the MMLab group.

The company organises its work around what it calls the ACE paradigm, launched in December 2025, which links environment-based data collection, the Kairos world model and embodied interaction. For data, multi-view capture devices record vision, touch, voice and force while people perform tasks; the company cites support for more than 10 viewpoints and 8 modalities and claims capacity of about 10 million hours of data per year. Supporting tools named on its website are the ACE Ego Kit capture kit, the ACE Data Engine automated data-production platform and the ACE Ego Matrix data standard.

Kairos 3.0, released publicly on 18 December 2025, is an open-source world model that combines multimodal understanding, generation and prediction of physical interactions. An open version, Kairos 3.0-4B, can drive robots on-device, an on-device deployment controlling physical robots was reported in March 2026, and the website now presents Kairos 3.1. A developer platform generates task simulations from simple instructions across 11 categories, 54 subcategories and 115 vertical embodied scenarios, with API access. Open research releases include the ACE-Brain-0 spatial intelligence model, the PhysX-Omni physical 3D generation framework and the Kairos-HomeWorld dataset built with the CUHK Multimedia Lab.

On the hardware side, the Embodied Super Brain Module A1 adapts to different robot bodies and lets them, demonstrated mainly on quadruped robots, follow instructions and navigate without prebuilt high-precision maps. Reported deployments include road-inspection robot dogs in Shanghai's West Bank area, hotels, unmanned retail stores and logistics warehouses.

Named ecosystem partners include robot makers Agibot and Galbot, chip suppliers MetaX and Biren Technology, hardware suppliers Insta360, Wolong Electric Drive and Paxini, and cloud providers Tencent Cloud and Volcano Engine. In early 2026 the company closed an angel round led by Ant Group with Qiming Venture Partners, Hony Capital and Lenovo Capital, followed in June 2026 by an angel-plus round with investors including Geely Capital, Shenzhen Capital Group, MetaX and SenseTime's Guoxiang Capital; cumulative 2026 funding was reported at several hundred million US dollars.