Science ministry names Alpha Pharmtech, Dranvi grand prize winners in smart device contest

The science ministry said Thursday that Alpha Pharmtech and Dranvi won the grand prize at its 2026 national smart device contest, a competition that this year put on-device AI at its center.

Alpha Pharmtech (Kim Hyun-soo) took the corporate category with a hospital medication-dispensing robot system built on collaborative robots. Dranvi (Park Ji-yoon) won the general category with EdgeGuard, a platform that controls on-device AI runtimes. Both received the deputy prime minister's award at a ceremony held at the LW Convention Grand Ballroom in Seoul.

Four teams took the next-highest award. Tripled Lab (Lee Jung-yoon) presented Earlibot, a dispensing robot arm for food processing built on physical AI; Adeol (Kim Je-pil) presented Psyco-Neu Vision, a deterministic machine-vision framework for the functional safety of physical AI; Roboin (Park Sung-hyun) presented UMMA, an autonomous mobile robot for building management; and BulLabs (Lee Kyung-min) presented an on-device AI system that corrects floor counts and guides disaster navigation inside buildings where spatial distortion blocks firefighters' perception.

The contest drew 161 entries after opening on May 26 — 64 in the corporate category and 97 in the general category. Preliminary and main rounds narrowed the field to 14 winning teams, of which six advanced to the final, where each team presented its entry and was judged live by a panel of five experts, including venture capitalists and technology project managers, on technical innovation, the potential to scale commercially and the capacity to go global.

Winners share 37 million won ($27,628) in prize money and receive practical support toward commercializing their products, including test and certification programs for 5G device terminals and ICT convergence quality certification. The corporate grand prize team also gets a place in the 2026 K-Digital Grand Championship, an integrated contest for South Korea's digital startups.

Park Tae-wan, the ministry's director-general for information and communications industry policy, said the smart device industry is converging on-device AI with physical AI, pushing devices toward a stage where they physically perceive their surroundings and control them safely.

"The government will work actively so that original products developed by domestic small and mid-sized companies and startups can enter global markets as well as the domestic market," Park said.

This year's contest, the 13th since it began in 2014, moved beyond ordinary smart devices to set on-device AI — in which a device judges and acts in real time without an external cloud connection — as its core theme.