Robotics · 15 October 2026 · 6 min read
South Korea clears a test of 20 humanoids beside workers. The robots are not in the plants yet
The trade ministry’s sandbox committee exempted a Robros trial at a chip plant, a car plant, a shipyard and a logistics site. The papers name the jobs. They do not name a start date, a model, or a result.
South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said on 13 October that its industrial-convergence sandbox committee had granted a demonstration exemption for humanoid robots in semiconductor, car, shipbuilding and logistics work. Seoul Economic Daily and the Kyunghyang Shinmun both reported the decision. Robros is to put 20 bipedal robots at four sites: Nepes, Sungwoo Hitech, HD Hyundai Samho and Delivery Lab. The exemption exists because the safety rules were written for robots that stay behind a fence. A machine that walks through the same space as a person did not fit them.
The jobs, as the two papers describe them, are ordinary and narrow. At the chip plant the robots are to clean contaminants off circular parts used in back-end packaging. At the car plant they are to position body parts. At the shipyard they are to stack the metal pieces that hold work platforms to a hull. At the logistics site they are to move refrigerated packs. The Kyunghyang adds that they will carry and load in the same space as workers. Seoul Economic Daily says the approval is conditional on risk assessments and risk-reduction measures required by the labour ministry. The data, the trade ministry says, will be used to write the rules for a wider rollout.
An exemption is not a shift
Nothing in either account says a robot has already done one of those jobs, how long the trial runs, or which Robros model will be used. The company sells a humanoid it calls IGRIS-C, 154 centimetres and 56 kilograms on its own page. The ministry notice, as reported, does not say that is the machine going into Nepes or the shipyard. A demonstration beside people can still be a supervised walk with a person ready to stop it. Until one of the four sites says a robot finished a counted task, 20 is a permit, not a workforce.
The same committee opened a second, smaller door. The Kyunghyang reports that Maum AI may pilot quadruped robots on walking trails and in parks around Cheonan, to patrol stairs and camera blind spots and to broadcast an evacuation if something is wrong. That is a different machine and a different job. It is the same kind of news: a rule moved, and a trial was allowed. Kim Jeong-kwan, the trade minister, said regulation has to move with the technology and that bottlenecks in the way of factory use should come down. He did not say the bottlenecks are already gone.