Samsung's Lee Jae-yong to inspect RX robot unit as early as next week, paper says

Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Jae-yong plans to visit the company's RX robotics business office as early as next week, Korean daily Money Today (머니투데이) reported on Oct 22, citing people in the electronics industry. It would be his first visit since the office was set up in July. Samsung has not announced the visit, and MEKAWIRE found no Samsung release on it.

The stakes are about timing. Samsung has already committed in public to a humanoid robot production line, and it now has a fixed date on which outsiders will judge its robots for the first time: CES 2027 in Las Vegas in January. A chairman's inspection three months before that show suggests the company wants to know whether the robots are ready to be seen.

What the paper says is on the agenda

According to Money Today, Lee will go to the RX office at Samsung's Seoul R&D Campus in Umyeon-dong, where researchers are expected to demonstrate precision manipulation with humanoid robot arms and hands. He is to review how far the robot technology Samsung may show at CES 2027 has progressed. The paper said the office was set up in July under Roh Tae-moon, head of the DX (device experience) division, to bring Samsung's robotics teams together from research to commercialisation, and that DX executives saw an internal robot demonstration in August in which a robot operated a camera and drew a card from a deck. Samsung is hiring for the office and expanding labs at the campus, the paper said. None of these details has been confirmed by Samsung.

The plan, as the paper describes it, is to prove robots in Samsung's own factories first, collect operating data there, and only then move into service and home robots.

What Samsung has said on the record

Samsung's own statements are more general but give the plan a physical address. In a June 29 release on its domestic investment programme, Samsung said it would invest KRW 60 trillion in the Yeongnam region to bring AX and RX, which the release spells out as robot transformation, into its manufacturing base, and that Samsung Electronics would build a physical AI and humanoid robot mass-production line in Gumi alongside a smartphone mother factory. At its Silicon Valley Tech Forum on Sept 18, the company said executives presented a medium- to long-term vision that extends from smart devices to AI and robots in daily life, with chief technology officer Yoon Jang-hyun speaking on the convergence of AI and robotics. The Samsung AI Forum 2026 on Sept 30 included a physical AI session on world models and robot foundation models and on Samsung's research in that area, the company said.

Samsung has owned 35% of [Rainbow Robotics](/companies/rainbow-robotics) since Dec 31, 2024, when it paid KRW 267.5 billion for an extra 3,935,814 shares and created a Future Robotics Office reporting to the chief executive ([story](/news/samsung-rainbow-robotics-largest-shareholder-35-percent-20241231)). Mobile humanoids such as the RB-Y1 were 40.5% of Rainbow's KRW 21.38 billion first-half 2026 sales, as our [Rainbow Robotics explainer](/news/what-is-rainbow-robotics-samsung-35-percent-rb-y1-mobile-humanoid-40-percent-of-revenue-explained-20261017) sets out.

Why the hand is the hard part

Money Today quoted an RX office lab head as telling the AI Forum that a robot may manage a backflip and still fail to open a bottle cap; Samsung's release on the forum does not carry the remark. The paper said Samsung is developing tendon-driven fingers, which pull cables the way human tendons move fingers, to control grip force on objects of different shapes and thickness. That problem is less about motors than about data: a robot learns how hard to press only from recordings that capture force and touch, not just camera images, as our [robot touch explainer](/news/robot-touch-explained-tactile-sensors-dexterous-hands-who-leads-sharpa-rhoda-jodell-wonik-aidin-tesollo-20261016) describes.

Korean start-ups are working on that data problem as well. Daejeon-based [Interact Robotics](/companies/interact-robotics) says on its website that it is building Dream Catcher, a force-feedback teleoperation rig that records the forces and touch an operator feels, aimed at automotive, electronics and shipbuilding lines.