Hyundai Motor Group

Boston Dynamics' chief executive is Rohit Prasad, who took the job on Oct 7, 2026 after 12 years at Amazon, where he led Alexa and the Nova foundation models. He reports to a board chaired by Hyundai Motor Group vice chair Jaehoon Chang, and inherits three robots, Spot, Stretch and the Atlas humanoid, plus Hyundai's plan for 25,000 Atlas units. MEKAWIRE explains who he is, what he controls and what Hyundai is betting on.

Kia said in a release on Hyundai Motor Group's newsroom on Oct 16 that it began a remote-driving car-sharing pilot in Pangyo, Gyeonggi Province, on Oct 15 and will run it to the end of the year, calling it the first test of remote driving in a real service in Korea. Employees of companies in the Second Pangyo Techno Valley book a PV5 Passenger van in an app; an operator in a control station drives the empty van over 4G and 5G networks to the requested spot, the user drives it and parks it, and the operator then drives it back to the depot. Kia supplies the vehicles and runs the project, autonomous-driving start-up SUM builds the remote-driving system, Mobiops operates the service and the Korea Road Traffic Authority reviews the legal side, with Gyeonggi Province and KT among the supporting bodies; the consortium uses three separate communication networks for redundancy. Kia, which obtained a Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport sandbox exemption for remote driving in April 2025 and ran road demonstrations in Jeju and Hwaseong, plans to widen the service in 2027 on the way to commercial launch; it gave no fleet size or pricing. For MEKAWIRE readers the pilot is the vehicle-side twin of the remote-operation model used in teleoperated humanoids, and the second Korean sandbox-backed robot deployment we have covered this month after the Robros humanoid approval.

The Korea AI and Robot Industry Association, chaired by Oh Jun-ho, said on Oct 15 that its board has named Hyundai Motor Company a vice-chair member and Qualcomm Technologies a board member, and admitted chip-packaging firm STATS ChipPAC Korea as a regular member, Robot Newspaper (irobotnews) reported; MEKAWIRE did not find the association's own release, so the details are as reported. The association said the new members bring carmaking, semiconductor and on-device AI expertise and will take part in its work on policy proposals, proof-of-concept projects for new AI and robot applications, overseas market support and cross-industry partnerships. Full-time vice chairman Bae Seok-tae said the group would focus on linking AI and robot technology across its members nationwide. The association also said its RoboWorld 2026 show runs Nov 4 to 7 with about 400 companies in 1,100 booths, including Rainbow Robotics, Robotis, DN Solutions, Advantech, FANUC, Unitree and Booster Robotics. Qualcomm's seat comes three weeks after it bought PickNik, the company behind the MoveIt motion-planning framework, a deal MEKAWIRE reported on Sept 23, and gives the US chipmaker a formal voice in Korea's main robot industry body alongside Hyundai Motor Group, owner of Boston Dynamics.

Hyundai Mobis said in a press release on Oct 15 that it held its Mobis Mobility Day in Shanghai on Oct 14, its first open-innovation event in China, inviting local companies, carmakers and investors to discuss robotics and physical AI. The parts maker had run the event regularly in Silicon Valley since 2022; it said about 300 people attended in Shanghai, including C-level executives of Chinese robotics companies and heads of global investment firms, and that interest was high because Mobis disclosed a humanoid actuator order earlier this year. The company said it picked Shanghai for the manufacturing base, supply chain and research clusters of the Yangtze River Delta, held follow-up meetings with major companies, and aims to find partners in robotics and semiconductors early, move them through joint proofs of concept and into commercial deals, using its Silicon Valley investment arm Mobis Ventures alongside its Korean strategy team. The programme included a panel on dexterous hands for physical AI. In MEKAWIRE's coverage, the order Mobis refers to is its January deal to supply actuators for Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid, its first robotics customer.

Korea's regulatory sandbox approval on October 13 lets Robros put 20 walking humanoids beside workers at Nepes, Sungwoo Hitech, HD Hyundai Samho and Delivery Lab, lifting a fence rule written for fixed industrial robots. Set against MEKAWIRE's records, the number is small: Hyundai plans 25,000 Atlas units, UBTech sold 921 full-size humanoids in six months and Figure says it builds one robot an hour. But Korea is the only market in our data where the state has formally changed who may let a humanoid work next to people, and that permission, not robot count, is what most factory deployments are still waiting for.

VAST Data said in a press release on Oct 13 that Hyundai Motor Company and Kia have made a strategic investment in it; neither side disclosed the amount or stake. 42dot, the group's autonomous mobility division and software center, already runs its driver-assistance and language-model development on VAST's AI Operating System on an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, and VAST says the setup cut real sensor and video data 2:1. Hyundai and Kia executive vice president Hokeun Chung said the group's autonomous driving and robotics work depends on using vehicle data quickly at growing volume. MEKAWIRE's company records show the group took control of Boston Dynamics in 2021 and plans to deploy the production Atlas humanoid at its Georgia Metaplant from 2028, so the stake extends its physical-AI bets from robot hardware to the data layer underneath; VAST itself was valued at $30 billion in its April 2026 Series F, per the release.

A team led by Professor Im Chang-hwan of Hanyang University's Department of Biomedical Engineering said on Oct 8 that, together with the Hyundai Motor and Kia Robotics Lab, it controlled the X-ble MEX lower-limb wearable robot in real time with a hybrid brain-computer interface, in work published in IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering (DOI 10.1109/TNSRE.2026.3729803), Robot Newspaper (irobotnews) reported. Instead of pressing buttons on a crutch handle, the user wears AR glasses showing four options (single step, continuous walking, turn left, turn right); a wireless dry-electrode EEG headband detects which option the user is looking at, a one-eye wink picked up as an electro-oculogram signal executes it, and clenching the jaw, read by EMG, cancels or stops. In trials with ten healthy adults walking a set route, turning and sitting down, the team reported 95.06% average EEG selection accuracy, F1 scores of 99.80% for winks and 99.22% for jaw clenches, a usability score of 78.25 against 53.50 for the crutch-button method, and a drop in perceived physical workload from 7.85 to 3.15. Four of the eight authors are from the Hyundai-Kia Robotics Lab, which develops the X-ble line; the study used healthy volunteers, not paraplegic users. It is the second brain-signal rehabilitation robot in MEKAWIRE's Korean coverage this week, after Dynamic Solution's BCI hand on Oct 15, alongside Hurotics' KRW 25bn round for wearable gait suits.

Swiss legged-robot maker ANYbotics has released Shift, a four-module platform that plans robot inspection rounds, analyses the readings and pushes findings into plant systems such as SAP and IBM Maximo. The company says Shift already analyses more than 120,000 inspections a month across over 1,000 industrial assets.

South Korea's National Advanced Strategic Industry Committee adopted a plan on September 30 to deploy 200,000 AI robots by 2030, about 15,000 through public procurement and 185,000 through private adoption. The state will buy more than 1,700 units in 2027 for public safety, labour-short sites and education, and will widen purchases to public enterprises and local governments from 2028.

Boston Dynamics opened the Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, where Atlas is training on parts sequencing ahead of assembly work by 2030. The company said Hyundai plans to deploy 25,000 Atlas units and build a US facility able to make 30,000 robots a year, while Hyundai targets Atlas on its Georgia line from 2028.

Houston-based Persona AI disclosed in an SEC Form D filed on September 14, 2026 that it has sold $65,363,626 of a planned $141,964,814 private offering to 46 investors, with the first sale on August 28. The company, which builds humanoid robots for shipyard welding and other skilled trades and has a deployment agreement with HD Hyundai, raised $27 million in a pre-seed round in May 2025.

LG Group and NVIDIA signed a strategic collaboration MOU on Aug. 13 covering robots, AI factories and mobility, LG Corp. said. LG will unveil a bipedal humanoid on Jetson Thor and Isaac GR00T in the first quarter of 2027 using LG Electronics actuators, LG Innotek sensors and LG Energy Solution batteries, and will test its wheeled CLOiD on a Tennessee washing-machine line this year.

Tesla said in its second-quarter 2026 update, released on July 22, that it has decommissioned the Model S and Model X lines in Fremont and is installing first-generation Optimus production lines, with production expected soon and the first robots reserved for an internal Optimus Academy that collects training data. Capital expenditure rose to $5.79 billion from $2.49 billion in the first quarter and free cash flow turned negative at minus $1.09 billion, while the update gave no robot unit count, no capacity figure and no date for Optimus Gen 3.

Walden Robotics, spun out of Toyota Research Institute in January 2026, emerged from stealth on July 15, 2026 with a $300 million seed round at a $1.1 billion valuation co-led by Toyota and Deviation Capital. The Cambridge, Massachusetts company says its robots, driven by large behavior models, have been doing production work at a Toyota plant in North America since February, and on July 28 it added Samsung SDS as a manufacturing partner.

Seoul on June 29 named physical AI alongside semiconductors and AI data centres as a national mega project and set out a '3M' plan for AI robots. The plan targets ten industry-specific humanoids commercialised by 2028, 1,000 robot deployments a year, data factories for ten sectors and a robot foundry in Saemangeum tied to Hyundai Motor Group investment.

Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 on April 14, 2026, an embodied reasoning model built on Gemini 3.0 Flash and offered as a preview through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio. DeepMind said the model reads industrial instruments correctly 86% of the time, or 93% with an agentic zoom and code execution step, against 23% for ER 1.5. Boston Dynamics is using the capability for Spot facility inspections.

UBTech Robotics said in its 2025 annual results that revenue from full-size humanoid robots rose 2,203.7% to RMB820.6 million on 1,079 units, lifting group revenue 53.3% to RMB2.0 billion. The net loss narrowed to RMB789.8 million, while three share placings raised RMB5.78 billion to fund capacity for more than 6,000 robots a year.

Mind Robotics, the industrial AI robotics company founded and led by Rivian chief executive RJ Scaringe, said on March 11, 2026 that Accel and Andreessen Horowitz co-led a $500 million Series A, about four months after a $115 million seed. Rivian's filings show it deconsolidated the start-up in March, valued its remaining 37.6% at about $569 million using the Series A share price and recorded a $506 million gain, which by MEKAWIRE arithmetic implies an equity value near $1.51 billion.

The European Commission cleared SoftBank Group's purchase of ABB's robotics division, valued at USD 5.375 billion, under its simplified procedure on 11 March 2026. The price equals 17.2 times the division's 2024 EBITDA, while the floor valuation of Skild AI, whose round SoftBank led in January, is 2.6 times as high. Approvals in China and the United States remain, and both companies expect closing in mid-to-late 2026.

BMW Group said on 27 February 2026 that Plant Leipzig will pilot Hexagon Robotics' wheeled AEON humanoid in high-voltage battery assembly and component production, after a first test in December 2025 and with the pilot phase set for summer 2026. It also set up a Munich-based Center of Competence for Physical AI in Production and published the results of its 2025 Figure 02 pilot in Spartanburg, where the robot moved more than 90,000 parts in about 1,250 hours.

Hyundai Motor Group agreed on February 27, 2026 to invest about 9 trillion won from 2026 in a robotics, AI and hydrogen hub at Saemangeum in North Jeolla. The plan includes a 400 billion won robot cluster with a finished-robot factory sized for about 30,000 units a year, a contract-manufacturing foundry and a parts complex, due in 2029, next to a 5.8 trillion won AI data centre scaled in phases to 50,000 GPUs.

Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada has signed a Robots-as-a-Service agreement with Agility Robotics to deploy Digit humanoids in manufacturing, supply chain and logistics work at its Cambridge and Woodstock plants in Ontario, following a pilot. Neither company disclosed fleet size, contract value or term. The deal adds a Toyota vehicle plant to a Digit customer list that already includes GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon and Mercado Libre, as rivals tie up with BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai.

Figure AI on Jan. 27, 2026 released Helix 02, a robot foundation model that runs a humanoid from camera pixels and fingertip touch down to joint commands at 1 kHz, replacing 109,504 lines of hand-written C++ with a 10-million-parameter learned controller. The company showed a Figure 03 unloading and reloading a dishwasher across a full kitchen in a four-minute, 61-action run it says had no resets and no teleoperation.

Hyundai Mobis will supply actuators for the production version of Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid under a framework announced at CES on January 7, 2026, its first robotics customer. The Hyundai parts maker says actuators make up more than 60% of a humanoid's material cost, and plans to extend the tie-up to grippers, sensors, controllers and battery packs as Hyundai Motor Group targets 30,000 robots a year by 2028.

Mobileye agreed on 5 January 2026 to buy Israeli humanoid developer Mentee Robotics for $900 million in cash and stock and closed the deal on 3 February. Its filings show chief executive Amnon Shashua, Mentee's chairman and co-founder, receives about $341 million and chief technology officer Shai Shalev-Shwartz about $118 million, with 90% of the founders' stock released only after two and four years. Mentee targets autonomous customer pilots in 2026 and series production in 2028.

Boston Dynamics unveiled the production version of its electric Atlas humanoid at CES 2026 on January 5 and said manufacturing begins immediately in Boston, with all 2026 units already committed to Hyundai Motor Group and Google DeepMind. Hyundai set a goal of a production system able to build 30,000 robots a year by 2028, when Atlas is due to start parts sequencing at its Georgia Metaplant, moving into assembly by 2030. Hyundai Mobis will supply the actuators and Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics models are to supply the cognition.

LG Electronics unveiled the CLOiD home robot and launched LG Actuator AXIUM, a brand of motor, drive and reducer joint modules aimed at the wider robotics market, at CES 2026. The robot came with detailed joint counts but no price or date, and the actuator with no specifications or customer, leaving LG behind Hyundai Mobis, which named Boston Dynamics' Atlas as its first actuator customer three days later.

Hyundai Motor Group said on 16 November 2025 it will invest KRW125.2 trillion in South Korea from 2026 to 2030, its largest domestic commitment and KRW36.1 trillion more than in the previous five years. The plan puts KRW50.5 trillion into future businesses including AI, robotics and hydrogen, and lists a robot manufacturing and foundry facility, a Physical AI Application Center and a petabyte-scale AI data center that is still under review.

NVIDIA and South Korea said on 31 October 2025 that more than 260,000 NVIDIA GPUs will go into the government's sovereign cloud and the country's biggest industrial groups. Hyundai Motor Group and NVIDIA put about $3 billion behind a physical AI push that includes virtual testing of humanoid robots, while Samsung and SK plan AI factories with robotics and digital twin workloads.

SoftBank Group will acquire ABB Robotics for an enterprise value of US$5.375 billion, the two companies said on 8 October 2025, replacing ABB's plan to list the unit separately in 2026. The division had 2024 revenue of US$2.279 billion and about 7,000 employees, and the deal needs approval in the EU, China and the US before an expected close in mid-to-late 2026.

South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy launched the K-Humanoid Alliance in Seoul on 10 April 2025, with about 40 companies, universities and other organisations signing a cooperation agreement aimed at making Korea the world's leading humanoid nation by 2030. The ministry expects more than 1 trillion won of public and private investment by 2030 and set 2028 targets for a shared robot AI foundation model and for humanoids under 60kg with more than 50 degrees of freedom.

Hyundai Motor Group said on March 24, 2025 it will invest US$21 billion in the United States from 2025 to 2028, lifting US vehicle capacity to 1.2 million units and building a 2.7 million-ton steel mill in Louisiana. US$6.3 billion goes to future industries and energy, including faster commercialisation at Boston Dynamics and reinforcement-learning robot work with the RAI Institute, though the group did not say how much is earmarked for robots.

Samsung Electronics exercised a call option on 31 December 2024 to raise its Rainbow Robotics stake from 14.71% to 35.00%, buying 3,935,814 shares from the founding group for 267,462,550,960 won. It also created a Future Robotics Office reporting to the chief executive, led by Rainbow co-founder Oh Jun-ho, and closed the share purchase on 12 March 2025.