At the KIMM research institute, 12 remote-controlled humanoids collect motion and task data for training AI. From the end of 2027, the facility is to be open to others too.
The Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials, KIMM for short, and the research institute ETRI opened the AI Humanoid Data Factory on 3 November. According to KIMM, it is the first facility in South Korea built solely to produce data for bipedal humanoid robots. 12 humanoids are currently working there.
Operators remotely control the robots through various tasks. The movements and all the information generated in the process are recorded and used to train AI. The facility is designed as a cycle. The data trains the AI, the trained AI runs on real robots, their performance is verified, and the new task data feeds into the next round of training. The goal is a general AI model that runs on different humanoids and is not tied to a single platform.
At the opening, robots took items out of a refrigerator, handled laundry and tidied a sofa. The facility also showed how data for industrial tasks is collected, for example when operating buttons and levers inside a vehicle. KAIROS, the humanoid developed at KIMM, demonstrated precise grasping and the imitation of human full-body movements.
KIMM plans to gradually expand the number of robots and tasks and to open the data factory step by step to industry, universities and research institutions in South Korea from the end of 2027. KIMM President Ryu Seok-hyeon called large volumes of high-quality robot data central to the country's technological competitiveness.