Korea Clears 20 Robros Humanoids for Live Factory Tests — Price Undisclosed
South Korea’s Industrial Convergence Regulatory Sandbox Review Committee, under the trade ministry, granted Robros an exemption on October 13 to test 20 bipedal humanoids on live factory floors. Until now, humanoids reached Korean plants only through one-off, company-by-company exceptions; current industrial-robot safety rules assume fixed machines behind physical barriers.
Where they will work. Per local press reports, the pilots cover four sites: Nepes (semiconductor packaging, cleaning components), Sungwoo Hitech (placing auto body parts), HD Hyundai Samho (stacking scaffolding brackets on ship hulls) and Delivery Lab (moving refrigerated packaging). The robots will share space with human workers rather than sit in cages.
What it costs. Nothing has been disclosed: no unit price, no lease rate, and no model name beyond “Robros bipedal humanoids”. That is why we have not added an entry to the index. A regulatory approval is not an offer, and a pilot fleet of 20 is a test, not a product you can order.
Why it still matters for pricing. The binding constraint on industrial humanoids is increasingly not hardware cost but permission to run next to people. The approval is meant to generate data for rewriting safety standards. If that works, the first compliant deployments should move from “exception” to “procurement line item”, which is when real quotes tend to appear.
For scale, the benchmark most buyers cite is still Western: Figure’s Figure 02 worked at a BMW plant, and enterprise pricing there remains unpublished too. For what you can actually buy today with a listed price, see our humanoid robots for sale guide and the companies index.
Verdict: a regulatory milestone, not a pricing event. We will add Robros to the dataset when a verifiable price or order page exists.