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Ann Cao

Alibaba Group Holding’s mapping unit has unveiled an upgrade to what it calls the world’s first technology framework that unites a robot’s “feet, hands, brains, central nerves and motor nerves” into a single system.
Amap’s ABot system marks the latest move in Chinese tech players’ race to harness artificial intelligence models to make robots more capable. Referred to as embodied intelligence, the effort aims to equip machines with the “brains” and other elements required to navigate and complete tasks in complex physical spaces.
With five new specialised foundation AI models working together, ABot aimed to address a systemic problem in the industry, according to Amap: the lack of a complete, self-evolving system.
“The industry has long focused on breakthroughs in single models – better navigation models, more powerful operation models and smarter reasoning models – but these models operate independently without shared data and experience,” it said in a social media post on Wednesday.
With its five models – ABot-N1, ABot-M0.5, ABot-ER, ABot-AgentOS, and ABot-C0 – working in concert, the Amap system sought to shatter those silos, according to the firm.
The ABot-N1 model employed an “eyes guiding feet” approach, enabling a robot to handle city-scale autonomous navigation with a 92.9 per cent outdoor success rate using only standard cameras and basic road networks, Amap said on Wednesday, adding that this bypassed the need for costly high-definition maps.
Meanwhile, ABot-M0.5 allowed a machine to “use hands and feet simultaneously”, divorcing movement functions from manipulation tasks so a robot could seamlessly grasp objects while walking, the company said.
ABot-ER and ABot-AgentOS acted as brain and central nervous system, respectively, helping to link tasks to objects, and then adapting across heterogeneous robotic bodies, according to Amap. ABot-C0 served as the “motor nerves” that finally translated the decisions of the ABot system into robot actions, it said.

The framework had secured state-of-the-art results across 17 global robotics benchmarks, the company added.
Tencent Holdings launched its own full-stack embodied intelligence offering at the latest World AI Conference in Shanghai last week, debuting its Hy-Embodied vision-language-action models to help robots perceive and reason.
Robbyant, the embodied AI arm of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group, earlier this month launched LingBot-Depth 2.0, its next-generation spatial perception model, which was designed to help robots accurately perceive glass, mirrors and transparent objects.
Ant is the fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, which also owns the South China Morning Post.
Amap, an increasingly important player in Alibaba’s AI push, has been pushing deeper into embodied intelligence in recent months. It also stepped up research into so-called world models – systems designed to simulate real-world environments to train robots to understand the physical world.


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ABot framework addresses industry’s lack of a complete, self-evolving system to improve robot capabilities, according to Amap


ABot framework addresses industry’s lack of a complete, self-evolving system to improve robot capabilities, according to Amap.


Alibaba unit says 5-in-1 AI gives robots unified brain, body and limbs

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}ABot framework addresses industry’s lack of a complete, self-evolving system to improve robot capabilities, according to Amap

ABot framework addresses industry’s lack of a complete, self-evolving system to improve robot capabilities, according to Amap