Alibaba DAMO Academy

Alibaba's frontier research institute, source of the open-source RynnBrain and other embodied-AI models.

DAMO Academy is a research institute Alibaba founded in 2017, headquartered in Hangzhou, spanning areas including chips, computer vision, and multimodal AI. In embodied AI, its main output is the Rynn family of open-source models: the RynnVLA series are vision-language-action models that turn an image and a spoken instruction directly into robot-arm actions, while RynnBrain, open-sourced in early 2026, is an embodied “brain” foundation model that emphasizes spatiotemporal memory and spatial reasoning — it understands a scene and plans tasks rather than directly driving motors. In 2026 it also formed a strategic partnership with China's National Pilot Base for Artificial Intelligence Applications (embodied intelligence). Newcomers reading embodied-AI papers will often see it listed among baselines or open-source models.

ExampleRynnBrain can watch a first-person video from a robot, answer where an object was placed earlier, and then plan the next action.

Also called

DAMO Academy, DAMO

Related

RynnBrain · RynnVLA-002 · Embodied Foundation Model · Vision-Language-Action Model · Qwen-VL

Sources

RynnBrain: Open Embodied Foundation Models (arXiv 2602.14979)
阿里达摩院与国家人工智能应用中试基地（具身智能）达成战略合作 (Chinese)

As of

2026-05