Doosan Gets $51M in State Support for Physical AI

SEOUL -- Doosan Robotics has been selected to lead two South Korean government-backed physical AI projects receiving about 68.1 billion won ($51 million) in public funding, including work on an industrial humanoid and collaborative robots that run AI locally.

The projects have a combined research and development budget of about 98.9 billion won, Doosan Robotics said Oct. 6. They are administered by South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and the Korea Planning & Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology.

The larger technology effort will put a domestically developed AI system-on-chip into robots so they can process camera, tactile, force and voice data without depending on an external computer or cloud service. The chip will combine a neural processing unit with real-time communications and control functions.

Doosan plans to develop three collaborative robots with payload capacities of 5, 10 and 20 kilograms, as well as an industrial humanoid capable of dual-arm manipulation and omnidirectional movement. The company plans 72-hour continuous-operation tests at at least two customer sites and will seek international safety certification before targeting commercialization from 2031. Those are development targets rather than completed tests or commercial products.

The project will run for 54 months, with participants including Aidin Robotics, Mobilint, the Korea Electronics Technology Institute and the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology. ROBOT24.com did not contact the other project participants to confirm their involvement.

A second project will combine collaborative robots, AI and digital twins to automate complex welding. Doosan says the system will use vision to identify welding targets and imitation learning to generate welding paths based on skilled workers' movements.

The company is targeting at least 95% similarity between robot-generated and human welding paths, with errors within 3 millimeters. Testing is planned at Doosan Enerbility's Nuclear Power Center. Those performance figures remain project goals.

The funding comes as South Korea directs more capital toward physical AI. The government previously outlined 16 trillion won in policy financing for AI adoption across strategic industries, including robotics, through its manufacturing AI initiative.

Doosan plans to combine technologies from the two new projects into a physical AI platform for collaborative robots. The company has not announced a price for the planned humanoid or identified customers that have committed to buying it.