Factories · September 27, 2026 · 2 min
HD Hyundai Robotics will put humanoid AI on the arms it already sells
The shipbuilder’s robot arm says perception and force control from its humanoid work should land on industrial and collaborative robots already in factories.
HD Hyundai Robotics plans to take perception and manipulation software from its humanoid program and put it on the industrial and collaborative arms it already sells, chief technology officer Ahn Sung-hwan told the Seoul Economic Daily.
The company is building humanoid prototypes, training them on manipulation tasks, and plans to run them on its own controller assembly line so the data comes from a real factory. Ahn said the hand is the piece that decides whether a humanoid is productive, so the near-term work is a hand that can do precise tasks, not a finished worker.
He described the projects as one platform, a “robot-defined factory,” meant to run industrial arms, cobots, mobile robots and humanoids in the same system across shipyards and other heavy plants. The point, he said, is robots that can cope when the part or the station changes, rather than a line that only repeats one motion.