The industrial robots in a car plant work inside a cage. Today's safety standards assume stationary machines and require fences and other barriers between people and the robot's work area. The whole point of a humanoid is that it moves through spaces built for people.
Twenty robots, four industries
- 20AI-powered bipedal humanoids cleared for live testing
- 4industries: semiconductors, cars, shipbuilding and logistics
On 13 October, South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy granted the robotics company Robros a regulatory exemption for live testing. Its twenty humanoids will work at four companies: at Nepes they will clean components used in semiconductor packaging, at Sungwoo Hitech they will place car body parts, at HD Hyundai Samho they will stack the brackets that hold work platforms to a ship's hull, and at Delivery Lab they will move refrigerated packaging.
Until now, each humanoid deployment needed its own company-by-company approval. The government will use the data from these tests to rewrite the safety standards and open the technology to manufacturing more broadly, as a way to meet labour shortages and raise productivity.
Rules written for machines that stand still are being rewritten for machines that walk.
Why it matters
In Minds first, then machines we argued that robotics is the second half of the singularity: intelligence changes what we know, and intelligence with a body changes what we have. The bottleneck for that second half is not only hardware. It is the standards that decide where a machine may work. Korea has shown how that bottleneck starts to open: a small, real test, with the data collected to write the next rule.
On the source
Our account follows the English edition of the Seoul Economic Daily, which is translated from Korean. We keep to what it reports and leave out quotations that may not match the original wording.