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12 hours ago
ResearchKR

Korea Institute of Robotics and Technology Convergence teams with materials institute KIMCO on robot materials

The Korea Institute of Robotics and Technology Convergence (KIRO) said it signed a memorandum with the Korea Institute of Materials Convergence Technology (KIMCO) in Busan on Oct 14 to jointly develop advanced and eco-friendly materials for next-generation robots, StartupN reported on Oct 15. KIMCO will contribute elastomer and fine-chemical materials expertise and KIRO robot design, control and materials-application work; the two will share research facilities and equipment, exchange researchers and swap technical information, with detailed projects still to be agreed. The materials push runs alongside the budget plan MEKAWIRE reported in September to raise Korea's humanoid core-parts spending more than fivefold to KRW 62 billion in 2027.

1 source
yesterday
ResearchKR

GIST, KETI and CMU spinout Lavoro AI sign pact on human-centred physical AI for care and creative robots

The Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology said it signed a memorandum on Sept 30 with the content and media division of the Korea Electronics Technology Institute and Lavoro AI, a robot-AI company founded by Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute professor Jean Oh, to research human-centred physical AI, AI Times Korea reported on Oct 14. Work runs through GIST's PAIR-HCI centre, its joint lab with MIT CSAIL, and will focus on robots that support creative work and care, with researcher exchanges and overseas internships; Lavoro AI has released RIO, an open-source framework for real-time control, teleoperation and AI model deployment across robot types, and is developing a foundation model for care. The partners did not name specific joint models, test sites or timelines. GIST's centre is funded with KRW 7.7 billion through 2030 under a science ministry programme, according to the report.

1 source
2 days ago
ResearchKR

Sungkyunkwan team lands two NeurIPS 2026 papers on cheaper AI agents and RL that ignores lucky robot wins

A Sungkyunkwan University team led by electrical engineering professor Kwon Min-hye has had two papers accepted at NeurIPS 2026, AI Times Korea reported on Oct 13. One, Selective Critique for Cost-Aware LLM Agents, lets an agent ask a stronger model for review only when its own confidence is low; in the team's simulated tests it cut compute to about a third and raised task success from 24.6% to 78.3%. The other, VAN-Flow, a variance-averse n-step offline reinforcement learning method, filters out actions that succeeded only by chance in logged data and, per the team, beat prior state-of-the-art methods on most of more than 40 cluttered or long-horizon robot control simulation tasks. Both results come from simulation and are not yet tested on hardware. The robot paper tackles the same reliability problem as Sanctuary AI's TIGER method, which MEKAWIRE covered this week, from the offline-data side.

1 source
18 days ago
ResearchKR

Neuromeka to lead KRW 17.5bn national project teaching robots to weld curved ship hull blocks on their own

Korean cobot maker Neuromeka said on Sept 28, in a statement posted to its newsroom, that it will lead a project under the Ministry of Science and ICT's programme to develop and test human-AI collaborative Large Action Models, focused on welding the curved outer-hull blocks used in shipbuilding. The project runs from August 2026 to December 2030 with a total budget of KRW 17.5 billion, of which KRW 10.5 billion is government R&D funding, and includes Neuromeka's subsidiary Robolution and other industry, academic and research partners. Neuromeka plans to build combined datasets of block geometry, weld-seam positions, robot motion, welding conditions and quality readings, then use them to train a model that lets the robot find seams, plan its own path and correct trajectory and settings in real time as parts distort under heat. Chief executive Park Jong-hoon said the company aims to turn the results into a standard autonomous welding platform for shipyards and later offshore plants, steel structures and defence. The ministry's wider physical-AI programme commits KRW 1.4131 trillion in North Jeolla and South Gyeongsang from 2026 to 2030. Earlier in September, Pohang City said Neuromeka signed an investment MOU for a KRW 180 billion robot foundry and data centre in the city, as reported by EBN and reposted on Neuromeka's site; on Oct 6 Doosan Robotics said it had won two government projects worth about KRW 98.9 billion, one of them for intelligent cobot welding.

2 sourcesNeuromekaDoosan Robotics
Jul 17, 2026
ResearchKR

RSS 2026's top paper, FlashSAC, cuts humanoid walking training on one GPU from hours to minutes

FlashSAC, an off-policy reinforcement learning method from a team spanning Holiday Robotics, KAIST, KRAFTON, TU Darmstadt, KTH and others, won the Outstanding Paper Award at Robotics: Science and Systems 2026 in Sydney. The authors report training a Unitree G1 walking policy in about 20 minutes on a single RTX 5090, against about three hours for the standard PPO method.

5 sourcesUnitree RoboticsNVIDIARLSim-to-Real Transfer
May 18, 2026
ResearchKR

Korea launches 50.4 billion won humanoid programme with KIST and three LG affiliates, putting solid-state batteries in robots

Korea's science ministry on May 18 started a five-year, 50.4 billion won programme to build a national AI humanoid platform led by KIST, with LG Electronics, LG AI Research and LG Energy Solution among the partners. The plan includes a vision, touch, language and action model, an all-solid-state battery for humanoids and a field test of at least 20 robots in care settings.

2 sourcesLG ElectronicsVLARobot Foundation Models