Science ministry opens humanoid robot data factory to teach machines to work

South Korea's science ministry said Tuesday it has opened a facility where humanoid robots are remotely operated to generate the movement data needed to train their artificial intelligence, the country's first data-production site dedicated to two-legged machines. The AI Humanoid Data Factory, built at the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials in Daejeon, is intended to reduce reliance on foreign data and give domestic humanoid robot research its own training base.

The ministry opened the site with the institute, known as KIMM, and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute. The facility is part of a strategic research program on autonomous, self-improving humanoid robots that runs from May 2025 to April 2030 and is led by KIMM in cooperation with ETRI.

Inside the factory, people operate robots by remote control and the system records the resulting joint movements and task data, capturing everything from arm and leg motion to work that uses the whole body.

"Securing high-quality robot work data at scale is the core of national technological competitiveness," KIMM President Ryu Seok-hyun said in a statement. He added that the institute would accelerate development of the domestic humanoid robot KAIROS and open the factory to industry, academia and research institutes in stages from late 2027.

KIMM is currently running 12 humanoid robots at the site and plans to add machines and task categories in phases. Collected data will be used to train AI that lets a robot carry out work on its own in response to human instructions and changing conditions, with the trained models applied to physical robots and the results fed back into further training.

At the opening ceremony, the robots demonstrated data collection by remote control and by imitating human movement, pulling items from a refrigerator, handling laundry and tidying a sofa, as well as industrial tasks such as operating buttons and levers inside a vehicle. KIMM also showed off precision object manipulation and whole-body motion imitation by KAIROS, its domestically developed humanoid robot.

"Building public data infrastructure that supports industry, academia and research cooperation is important for securing competitiveness in AI humanoid robots," said Kim Sung-soo, the ministry's director-general for research and development policy. He said the government would expand shared data production and use and would concentrate efforts on securing independent AI humanoid technology and on the K-Moonshot AI humanoid mission.