Robbyant’s inaugural Embodied AI Challenge attracted more than 1,800 teams from 13 countries before its online qualifying round closed on October 27. The competition’s final, scheduled for November 14–16 in Shanghai, will bring participants together for a real-robot hackathon. Robbyant, an embodied AI company within Ant Group, launched the challenge in September at the 2026 Inclusion Conference on the Bund, in partnership with ModelScope and Alibaba Cloud Tianchi. The competition is built around the open-source LingBot-VLA 2.0 embodied foundation model. It targets developers working on embodied AI algorithms, with evaluations covering model training and fine-tuning, generalization in simulation, and adaptation to physical robots. Enterprises, universities and individual developers worldwide are eligible to participate. Registered teams include researchers from Tsinghua University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Zhejiang University. International participants include groups from Carnegie Mellon University, University College London, Technical University of Munich, the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University. Industry participants include developers from Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, Meituan, Microsoft, BYD and Xiaomi. Robotics companies UBTECH, Fourier Intelligence and Agibot have also registered. Universities and research institutions account for 74.7% of participants, while master’s and doctoral students represent 67.4%. Developers from enterprises and engineering roles make up 25.2%. Participants with experience in vision-language-action (VLA) systems and multimodal foundation models account for 51.7%. The challenge is intended to provide a common environment for evaluating embodied foundation models against robotic tasks. By making LingBot-VLA 2.0 and its evaluation settings available to participants, the organizers aim to support experimentation beyond algorithm development and assess how models perform when adapted to physical robots. The post Robbyant Embodied AI Challenge Attracts 1,800 Teams for Real-Robot Trials appeared first on EE Times Asia .