South Korea’s new humanoid robot data factory teaches real-world tasks

What happened

For the first time ever, the South Korean government launched a humanoid (a robot built in roughly human shape) robot data factory that leverages 12 bipedal robots to gather physical motion and operational data across household and industrial settings. The Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM) unveiled the facility to support the development of autonomous physical AI systems in collaboration with the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) on November 3.

As the first such data generation laboratory in the country, the facility gathers high-resolution movement data across robotic arms, legs, and full-body systems. Human operators remotely guide the machines to undertake tasks of varying degrees of complexity, recording spatial coordinates, mechanical torque, and tactile feedback for each action. In industrial demonstrations, the robots showed off operational movements inside a vehicle, manipulating levers and control buttons to engage the systems.