Yandex Is Building the “Soul” of Russian Robots
The tech giant is developing a new kind of AI designed to truly understand — and interact with — the physical world.
Russian tech company Yandex has announced the launch of a major initiative to create the country’s first Physical AI — an artificial intelligence system capable of perceiving and interpreting the real world with human-like depth. The project brings together teams from Yandex Robotics and its autonomous transport division.
Unlike traditional AI, which focuses mainly on language or visual data, Physical AI will integrate images, video, sound, and text to form a contextual understanding of what’s happening around it — and respond accordingly.
A prototype can already transform voice and visual commands into concrete physical actions such as “pick up” or “put down.” Users will be able to issue hundreds of commands via speech, gestures, or text, making robot training far more intuitive.
Teaching robots to drive — and think
Yandex describes the project as the creation of a “soul” for automated systems — an intelligence that can perceive, decide, and act in the real world. In parallel, engineers are developing a machine learning–based planner for autonomous vehicles. Trained on professional driving data, the AI learns to build smoother, more predictable trajectories.
Meanwhile, Yandex’s delivery robots and driverless cars are training in advanced simulators that replicate rare and complex traffic scenarios, sharpening their ability to react safely and naturally.
By blending robotics, multimodal perception, and decision-making, Yandex aims to bridge the gap between virtual intelligence and the physical world — giving machines not just logic, but something close to intuition.
