Alibaba Group has unveiled its initial set of artificial intelligence models tailored for robots, marking its foray into the expanding domain of physical AI. Revealing the Qwen Robot Suite, developed by the Tongyi Lab, the tech giant disclosed that the suite is presently undergoing trial runs with handpicked Alibaba Cloud clients. The suite comprises three distinct models: Qwen-RobotNav for guiding through physical environments, Qwen-RobotWorld for forecasting scene progressions, and Qwen-RobotManip for executing physical duties. Notably, the latter model recently secured the highest score on the generalist track of the RoboChallenge real-robot benchmark, as confirmed by Alibaba.
This milestone signifies Alibaba’s shift beyond linguistic and multimodal software, positioning itself in direct rivalry with American players like Google DeepMind and Nvidia, alongside a cohort of Chinese tech entities striving to advance robot intelligence, namely Tencent, Unitree, and AgiBot. The sector is witnessing heightened attention from investors, exemplified by robotics firm Unitree’s initiation of the IPO process on the Shanghai Star Market.
