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ABU DHABI, UAE, Dec. 8, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Yesterday, the McLaren Formula 1® Team's Lando Norris celebrated his first ever Drivers' Championship win at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix whilst driving the MCL39 fan-designed livery. The VELO and the McLaren Formula 1® Team's livery design concept, co-created by nine superfans, features a series of bespoke icons, representing cherished fan memories and symbols, including an icon representing the papaya family and an icon representing back-to-back Constructors' Champions.
Following this epic win, the team are celebrating a legendary 8 1-2 finishes as they close off the season to their second Constructors' Championship year.
+18 Only. This product contains nicotine and is addictive.
ABOUT VELO
Originating in Scandinavia, Velo is a global brand of nicotine pouches.
Nicotine pouches are small pouches that contain nicotine. They're designed to be tucked between your lip and gum, where they release nicotine over a short time – this can be different from brand to brand. For adult nicotine consumers, nicotine pouches can be an alternative to cigarettes and a convenient way to consume nicotine. Nicotine consumers have more choices than ever, as VELO pouches also come in an assortment of flavours and nicotine strengths for different tastes and nicotine experience levels.
About BAT
BAT is a leading global multi-category consumer goods business. Underpinned by world-leading science and research and development, our purpose is to create A Better Tomorrow™ by Building a Smokeless World.
Central to achieving this is the concept of Tobacco Harm Reduction (THR) – the switching of smokers, who would otherwise continue to smoke, from risky forms of combustible tobacco products like cigarettes, to lower risk profile smokeless tobacco and nicotine products. This is outlined further in Omni™, an evidence-based manifesto for change, which captures BAT's commitment and progress on THR.
BAT employs more than 48,000 people and, in 2024, generated revenue of £25.9bn, with an adjusted profit from operations of £11.9bn.
BAT's aim is to have 50 million adult consumers of its smokeless products by 2030 and generate 50% of its revenue from these products by 2035. With 30.5 million current users – including vapour brand Vuse; heated product brand glo; and modern oral (nicotine pouch) brand Velo – BAT's new category revenues have climbed to £3.4bn in 2024, with strong progress in profitability.
BAT continues to strive towards reducing its use of virgin raw materials, enhancing the communities in which it operates and working towards net zero across its value chain by 2050. BAT received a "Triple-A" rating from CDP for its 2024 disclosures on Climate Change, Water Security and Forests; and was recently named a Financial Times Climate Leader for the fifth year running.
About McLaren Racing
McLaren Racing was founded by racing driver Bruce McLaren in 1963. The team entered its first Formula 1 race in 1966. McLaren has since won 22 Formula 1 world championships, over 200 Formula 1 Grands Prix, the Indianapolis 500 three times, and the Le Mans 24 Hours at its first attempt.
McLaren Racing competes across four racing series. The team competes in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship with McLaren F1 drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, the NTT INDYCAR SERIES with Arrow McLaren drivers Pato O'Ward, Nolan Siegel and Christian Lundgaard, and F1 Academy with Driver Development Programme member Ella Lloyd. The team also competes in the F1 Sim Racing Championship as McLaren Shadow.
McLaren is a champion for sustainability in the sport and a signatory to the UN Sports for Climate Action Commitment. It is committed to achieving net zero by 2040 and fostering a diverse and inclusive culture in the motorsport industry.
McLaren Racing – Official Website
ABU DHABI, UAE, Dec. 8, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Yesterday, the McLaren Formula 1® Team's Lando Norris celebrated his first ever Drivers' Championship win at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix whilst driving the MCL39 fan-designed livery. The VELO and the McLaren Formula 1® Team's livery design concept, co-created by nine superfans, features a series of bespoke icons, representing cherished fan memories and symbols, including an icon representing the papaya family and an icon representing back-to-back Constructors' Champions.
Following this epic win, the team are celebrating a legendary 8 1-2 finishes as they close off the season to their second Constructors' Championship year.
+18 Only. This product contains nicotine and is addictive.
ABOUT VELO
Originating in Scandinavia, Velo is a global brand of nicotine pouches.
Nicotine pouches are small pouches that contain nicotine. They're designed to be tucked between your lip and gum, where they release nicotine over a short time – this can be different from brand to brand. For adult nicotine consumers, nicotine pouches can be an alternative to cigarettes and a convenient way to consume nicotine. Nicotine consumers have more choices than ever, as VELO pouches also come in an assortment of flavours and nicotine strengths for different tastes and nicotine experience levels.
BAT is a leading global multi-category consumer goods business. Underpinned by world-leading science and research and development, our purpose is to create A Better Tomorrow™ by Building a Smokeless World.
Central to achieving this is the concept of Tobacco Harm Reduction (THR) – the switching of smokers, who would otherwise continue to smoke, from risky forms of combustible tobacco products like cigarettes, to lower risk profile smokeless tobacco and nicotine products. This is outlined further in Omni™, an evidence-based manifesto for change, which captures BAT's commitment and progress on THR.
BAT employs more than 48,000 people and, in 2024, generated revenue of £25.9bn, with an adjusted profit from operations of £11.9bn.
BAT's aim is to have 50 million adult consumers of its smokeless products by 2030 and generate 50% of its revenue from these products by 2035. With 30.5 million current users – including vapour brand Vuse; heated product brand glo; and modern oral (nicotine pouch) brand Velo – BAT's new category revenues have climbed to £3.4bn in 2024, with strong progress in profitability.
BAT continues to strive towards reducing its use of virgin raw materials, enhancing the communities in which it operates and working towards net zero across its value chain by 2050. BAT received a "Triple-A" rating from CDP for its 2024 disclosures on Climate Change, Water Security and Forests; and was recently named a Financial Times Climate Leader for the fifth year running.
About McLaren Racing
McLaren Racing was founded by racing driver Bruce McLaren in 1963. The team entered its first Formula 1 race in 1966. McLaren has since won 22 Formula 1 world championships, over 200 Formula 1 Grands Prix, the Indianapolis 500 three times, and the Le Mans 24 Hours at its first attempt.
McLaren Racing competes across four racing series. The team competes in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship with McLaren F1 drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, the NTT INDYCAR SERIES with Arrow McLaren drivers Pato O'Ward, Nolan Siegel and Christian Lundgaard, and F1 Academy with Driver Development Programme member Ella Lloyd. The team also competes in the F1 Sim Racing Championship as McLaren Shadow.
McLaren is a champion for sustainability in the sport and a signatory to the UN Sports for Climate Action Commitment. It is committed to achieving net zero by 2040 and fostering a diverse and inclusive culture in the motorsport industry.
McLaren Racing – Official Website
** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **
VELO AND THE McLAREN FORMULA 1® TEAM'S FAN-DESIGNED LIVERY TAKES CENTRE STAGE AS LANDO NORRIS WINS 2025 DRIVERS' CHAMPIONSHIP IN ABU DHABI
VELO AND THE McLAREN FORMULA 1® TEAM'S FAN-DESIGNED LIVERY TAKES CENTRE STAGE AS LANDO NORRIS WINS 2025 DRIVERS' CHAMPIONSHIP IN ABU DHABI
SHANGHAI, March 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- AGIBOT, a global leader in embodied intelligence and robotics, today officially announced the launch of the AGIBOT World Challenge at ICRA 2026, opening registration for its two flagship tracks: the Reasoning to Action Track and the World Model Track. Following the success of its inaugural edition, this year's competition returns to the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) with a broader vision and a record-breaking $530,000 USD prize pool.
Cutting-Edge Tracks, Ultimate Challenges
1. Reasoning to Action Track
This track is designed to evaluate a model's reasoning and action execution capabilities, encompassing both online simulation and offline real-robot stages. Participants will train models capable of solving a series of complex tasks based on the AGIBOT WORLD open-source dataset. The track focuses on bridging the Sim2Real Gap, achieving robust generalization from open-vocabulary understanding to real-world physical interaction. Tasks are designed in conjunction with real deployment scenarios and the Genie Sim 3.0 simulation platform, spanning common environments such as logistics, industrial, supermarket, food service, and home settings — with multiple challenges of varying difficulty levels.
Featured Task Scenarios:
- Continuous Sorting & Barcode Scanning
- Logistics Sorting
- Workpiece Inversion
- Shelf Stocking & Straightening Tilted Items
- Popcorn Scooping
- Door Opening
- Desk Clearing
- Dual-Arm Pot Handling
Dataset
We have carefully curated competition tasks and collected a dedicated set of high-quality data, with each task containing hundreds of complete manipulation trajectories. The dataset is fully open-sourced on Hugging Face and ModelScope for easy download:
https://huggingface.co/datasets/agibot-world/AgiBotWorldChallenge-2026
https://modelscope.cn/datasets/AgiBotWorld/AgiBotWorldChallenge-2026
Baseline Model
The competition will provide ACoT-VLA as the baseline model to help you quickly get up to speed with the training, testing, and submission workflow. You can compare the performance of different baseline models and select the most suitable one for development. We look forward to seeing your innovations built upon these models!
https://github.com/AgibotTech/ACoT-VLA
Evaluation Tool
For model evaluation, we provide Genie Sim 3.0 — the industry's first open-source simulation platform driven by large language models. This comprehensive evaluation platform integrates 3D reconstruction and visual generation to create a photorealistic, digital-twin-grade environment. Scenes, assets, and tasks within Genie Sim 3.0 are consistent with the test server, enabling participants to perform closed-loop evaluation locally. Genie Sim 3.0 utilizes AGIBOT's proprietary embodied brain Genie Reasoner to achieve fully automated VLM-based evaluation. Before submitting to the competition server, you can first validate your model and environment dependencies in the local simulation environment.
https://agibot-world.com/genie-sim
Competition Server
Starting now, participants can log in to the competition homepage to access event resources and submit their trained models — compete directly with the world's top developers and keep climbing up the ranking list!competing head-to-head with top developers worldwide and climbing the leaderboard!
https://agibot-world.com/challenge2026/reasoning2action/quick-start
2. World Model Track
The World Model Track focuses on the core capability of embodied world models — accurately modeling physical environment dynamics based on robot actions. Participants are required to train video generation models on the AGIBOT WORLD dataset, generating interaction videos of robots operating across 10 real-world task scenarios, based on provided real robot observations and action signals. Tasks span multiple real-world environments including furniture, retail, and industrial settings, providing a comprehensive evaluation of model generation quality. This track features an online-only competition stage.
Dataset
We have constructed a World Model training set of 10 diverse tasks based on the AGIBOT WORLD public dataset, covering over 30,000 real trajectories. The data encompasses a wide variety of robot-environment interaction types, such as grasping, placing, pushing, and pulling. The test set includes both expert trajectories and imperfect action trajectories (e.g., missed grasps, collisions), designed to comprehensively evaluate the generalization capability of generative models.
https://huggingface.co/datasets/agibot-world/AgiBotWorldChallenge-2026/tree/main/WorldMode
Baseline Model
The competition adopts EVAC — AGIBOT's proprietary open-source model — as the baseline. EVAC is the first embodied world model driven by robot actions, pre-trained on the full AGIBOT WORLD dataset. Participants may develop on top of EVAC or use other models to compete. We encourage participants to innovate boldly and showcase their technical capabilities!
https://github.com/AgibotTech/AgiBotWorldChallengeICRA2026-WorldModelBaseline
Evaluation Tool
The competition evaluates generated results using EWMBench, an embodied world model evaluation benchmark, assessing across multiple dimensions including image quality, scene consistency, and trajectory adherence — accurately reflecting generative model performance and providing reliable feedback.
https://github.com/AgibotTech/EWMBench
Evaluation Server
Starting now, participants can log in to the evaluation server hosted on HuggingFace, submit results according to the competition guidelines, and compete with developers worldwide — with the leaderboard updated in real time!
https://huggingface.co/spaces/agibot-world/ICRA26WM
Key Milestones — Mark Your Calendar
The AGIBOT World Challenge @ ICRA 2026 follows a rigorous selection process, culminating in the live finals this summer:
- February 12, 2026: Global Registration officially opens
- February 28, 2026: Competition servers for both tracks go live
- April 20, 2026: Competition server closes for final submissions
- April 30, 2026: Announcement of online stage results and finalists
- June 1, 2026: Offline real-robot finals begin at ICRA 2026
The stage is set for the world's most elite teams to demonstrate their prowess. As the AGIBOT World Challenge at ICRA 2026 unfolds, it will serve as a definitive arena where technical ingenuity meets physical capability, and where the strongest innovators will rise to define the next era of robotics.
Join the Community
AGIBOT invites developers and researchers worldwide to join the official Lark (Feishu) community. Connect with global peers, access real-time technical support, and stay updated on the latest challenge milestones through the following link: https://applink.feishu.cn/client/chat/chatter/add_by_link?link_token=b03mea0a-1212-428a-8b78-f77cf6f591e3
For more information, please visit AGIBOT at AGIBOT.com and follow AGIBOT on:
https://www.facebook.com/AGIBOT.zhiyuan
https://x.com/AGIBOT_zhiyuan
https://www.instagram.com/AGIBOT
https://www.youtube.com/@AGIBOT-robot
About AGIBOT
AGIBOT is dedicated to driving innovation through the integration of AI and robotics, creating world-leading general-purpose embodied robot products and an application ecosystem. Built on the foundation of the robotic body and powered by the fusion of interaction, manipulation, and locomotion intelligence — "1 Robotic Body + 3 Intelligence" — AGIBOT is a leading robotics company in the industry to deliver a complete product portfolio and deploy across all major application scenarios.
** This press release is distributed by PR Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **
AGIBOT World Challenge at ICRA 2026 Now Opens "Reasoning to Action" and "World Model" Tracks
