Ant Group, the Chinese fintech giant behind Alipay, is pushing deeper into robotics through a subsidiary focused on the software that controls physical machines.
According to Business Wire, the company — identified as Robbyant — has launched LingBot-VA 2.0, a system described as "built natively for embodied AI and physical world control." In plain terms, that means software designed from the ground up to let a robot perceive its surroundings and act on them, rather than software adapted from tools built for screens and text.
According to Pandaily, the same subsidiary, which it refers to as Lingbo, is "taking a new approach to building robot brains." The two outlets use slightly different names for the venture and its product, but both describe an Ant Group robotics effort centered on the control layer that turns AI models into real-world movement.
"Embodied AI" is the industry's term for intelligence that lives inside a physical body — a robot arm, a mobile machine, a humanoid — and has to deal with the messiness of the real world: friction, gravity, objects that shift, and tasks that can't be undone with an "undo" button. Getting that control layer right is widely seen as one of the hardest remaining problems in robotics.
The sources do not detail the system's technical specifications, performance benchmarks, pricing, or availability.
Why it matters: one of China's largest tech companies is staking a claim in the software that could decide how the next generation of robots actually operates in the physical world.