Building a Foundation Stack for General-Purpose Robots

IEEE Spectrum AI · 3 days ago

X Square Robot, a Chinese robotics company, has developed an integrated foundation stack for general-purpose robots consisting of data collection, a world model (WALL-WM), and an action model (Wall-OSS-0.5) designed to work together as interdependent layers. The company reports achieving performance comparable to all-robot datasets at roughly 20-fold lower collection cost by combining robot-free demonstrations captured with a wearable rig with small amounts of real-robot data. The approach emphasizes data quality through physical playback validation, event-based world modeling rather than fixed-length predictions, and semantic action tokenization that transfers across different robots without retuning.