SEOUL — RLWRLD last week unveiled its robotics foundation model, an artificial intelligence system designed for robots, at an event in Seoul. The company expects industrial AI robots to be deployed at scale around 2028.

RLWRLD is working with Lotte Hotel Seoul to build a library of human expertise for AI robots. The company is also collecting data from logistics workers at CJ on how they grip, lift, and handle goods in warehouses, and from staff at Lawson on how they organize food displays. Engineers at RLWRLD say replicating human hand dexterity is a key priority for AI robots.

At the five-star Lotte Hotel Seoul, David Park, who has worked at the property for nine years, wears body cameras on his head, chest, and hands while folding banquet napkins to capture his motions. Each motion is fed into a database intended to teach robots to replicate the task.

The data-gathering effort runs parallel to a broader push by the South Korean government, which announced a $33 million project last month to capture the instinctive know-how and skills of master technicians into a database for AI-powered manufacturing. Major South Korean manufacturers are moving in the same direction. Hyundai Motor plans to introduce humanoids built by its robotics unit Boston Dynamics at its global factories, starting with its Georgia plant in 2028. Samsung Electronics plans to convert all manufacturing sites into AI-driven factories by 2030, with humanoids and task-specific robots deployed across production lines.

Billy Choi, a professor at Korea University's center for Human-Inspired AI Research, said the country's industrial focus shapes its robotics priorities. "South Korea has a highly developed manufacturing sector and the focus is squarely on humanoids tailored specifically for those industries," Choi said.

The technology underpinning these systems is known as physical AI, which refers to machines equipped with artificial intelligence and sensors that can perceive, decide, and act in real-world environments with some degree of autonomy, moving beyond conventional factory robots designed for repetitive tasks. Unlike chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini, which train on vast troves of internet text, physical AI systems require data drawn from human movement and physical tasks. U.S. technology companies including Tesla, along with a range of Chinese firms, are investing billions of dollars into humanoids and other AI robots.