Robbyant Embodied AI Challenge draws more than 1,800 teams

The challenge was launched in September at the 2026 Inclusion Conference on the Bund, organized by Robbyant in partnership with ModelScope and Alibaba Cloud Tianchi. It is built on the open-source LingBot-VLA 2.0 embodied foundation model, which gives developers a common starting point for training, fine-tuning, and simulation-based testing before moving to real robots. The participant mix is notably academic: teams from universities and research institutions make up 74.7% of the total, with master's and doctoral students at 67.4%. Enterprise and frontline engineering roles account for 25.2%, and 51.7% of participants have backgrounds in VLA (vision-language-action) and multimodal foundation models. The roster includes Tsinghua University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University College London, Technical University of Munich, National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, alongside developers from Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, Meituan, Microsoft, BYD and Xiaomi, and robotics teams such as UBTECH, Fourier Intelligence and Agibot. By opening access to LingBot-VLA 2.0 and related evaluation settings, the organizers aim to widen participation in embodied AI development and help move algorithmic work toward practical robotic applications.