South Korea has cleared the way for the country's first on-site test of humanoid robots performing real manufacturing work alongside human employees. The Trade Ministry announced on October 13, 2026 that its regulatory sandbox committee on industrial convergence, meeting for the sixth time this year, granted a testing exemption to robotics company Robros for a project that will put 20 AI-equipped bipedal humanoid robots to work across semiconductor, automotive, shipbuilding and logistics sites.

The robots will be deployed at facilities run by Nepes, Sungwoo Hitech, HD Hyundai Samho and Delivery Lab, and each site will assign them a different job. At the chip plant, they will remove contaminants from circular components used in back-end packaging. At the auto plant, they will position car body parts. At the shipyard, they will stack the metal pieces used to anchor elevated work platforms to a ship's hull during construction, and at the logistics site they will move refrigerated packaging units. In every case, the robots will operate in spaces identical or adjacent to those of human workers, recognizing and picking up objects before carrying and stacking them.

The exemption matters because existing safety rules were written for fixed industrial robots. Those standards assume machines that stay in one place and require fences and other barriers to keep people and robots apart. That model is hard to apply to humanoid robots, which must move freely and share space with people, and it has been the main obstacle to putting them on factory floors.

Approval comes with conditions. The government requires that the risk assessments and risk-reduction measures set by the Ministry of Employment and Labor are carried out during the test. The pilot will identify hazards that arise when workers and humanoid robots share a workspace and verify whether safety measures actually work. The data collected will then feed into the safety standards and regulatory changes needed for wider industrial adoption.

The project is also a step up in ambition. Humanoid robots in industry have largely been limited to simple transport tasks, whereas this test covers production work and will examine performance and adaptability across very different environments, from precision cleaning in chipmaking to positioning auto parts and stacking shipbuilding materials. The ministry plans to use the pilot to speed up the AI transformation of manufacturing under its M.AX, or Manufacturing AI Transformation, initiative.

Robots are also moving beyond factory walls. At the same meeting, the committee approved patrols by four-legged walking robots on pedestrian paths for the first time. Maum AI will test a self-driving quadruped patrol robot on riverside walking trails and in parks in Cheonan, where the robot will use AI to analyze its surroundings in real time, broadcast warnings when it detects a hazard and send video and location data to a control system.

Regulators say they are working to keep rules in step with the technology. The ministry plans to introduce cybersecurity standards tailored to manufacturing sites by early 2028 to counter data tampering and hacking, and it will develop a draft standard for AI technology levels in home appliances by the end of this year to curb so-called AI washing, where products with no real AI functions are marketed as AI. Trade Minister Kim Jung-kwan acknowledged that rule-making is lagging behind the pace of AI progress and said officials must move quickly to clear regulatory roadblocks for companies developing and applying new technologies.