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TARS Debuts at WAIC 2026 as Its AWE Embodied Foundation Model Wins Prestigious SAIL Award

TARS-WAIC-2026

PR Newswire

TARS showcased its vision for "Trustworthy Physical AI" at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC 2026), held July 17–20 at the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition & Convention Center, where its AWE (AI World Engine) embodied foundation model received the prestigious SAIL (Superior Al Leader) Award for technical innovation and industrial potential.

At the WAIC main forum, TARS Founder and CEO Dr. Chen Yilun introduced AWE 3.5, the company's latest embodied-native foundation model. Built on more than one million hours of human-centric, real-world data validated in industrial settings, AWE 3.5 integrates action, perception, geometry, and tactile sensing within a unified framework. Compared with Pi 0.5,  the model approximately doubles task-execution efficiency, improves complex-task performance, and maintains closed-loop interaction across tasks lasting several minutes. AWE 3.5 is also the first to complete an embodied-native "pre-training + post-training" paradigm designed to support reproducible, scalable, and continuous iteration.

TARS demonstrated AWE-powered robots performing phone packing, backpack organization, and precision screw sorting, showing how the model translates physical understanding into deployable actions and generalizes to unfamiliar objects and scenarios. Having surpassed 1 million hours of high-quality human-centric data, TARS plans to expand its pre-training dataset to 10 million hours by the end of 2026, further strengthening generalization, long-horizon reasoning, and real-task execution.