South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) was on the Day One program at Humanoids Summit Seoul, a two-day event that opened at COEX on Sept. 22, 2026, and ran through Sept. 23. The program listed Deputy Minister Dokyu Lee for congratulatory remarks and Director Changjong Song for a midday briefing titled "Physical AI Policy in Korea." Physical AI is AI that senses and acts in the real world through machines such as robots and self-driving cars, and Seoul is treating it as a national industrial program, not only a trade-show theme. The official program put that policy message on the same stage as pitches for humanoids, robots built in a human shape, usually walking on two legs, and for the software and factory deployments behind them.
A policy briefing is not the same as robots already running factories on their own. Beyond the ministry speakers, the official agenda lists a lunch workshop sponsored by NVIDIA and ROBOTIS on building humanoids with NVIDIA's Isaac GR00T, with live demos of AI Sapiens and AI Worker; a talk by Unitree's Asia-Pacific director on scaling up its robots; a keynote from RLWRLD on five-finger dexterity; a ROBOTIS talk on an open humanoid platform; and a Day Two keynote on deploying humanoids at industrial scale. Pre-event publicity had named Second Vice Minister Ryu Je-myung for the opening remarks; the agenda lists Dokyu Lee instead.
A news report from the COEX Grand Ballroom on Sept. 22 said an AI humanoid gave a morning demonstration, and described the Seoul debut as a conference on the commercialization and business strategy of humanoid robots and physical AI, first launched in Silicon Valley in 2024. A second report from the floor that day said the Seoul debut has MSIT backing, with RLWRLD as exclusive technology partner, and quoted ROBOTIS founder and CEO Byoungsoo Kim arguing that humanoids will settle in as platforms with many apps, much like smartphones.
The second report also set the industry pitch against what visitors could actually see. Park Ji-hyeon, head of sales at Roas, Unitree's official distributor in South Korea, said fully autonomous humanoids practically do not exist yet, and that there is nothing beyond teleoperation, a person steering the robot remotely, or robots that follow preset commands, with Unitree no exception. The report described a humanoid trained by RLWRLD clearing varied objects off a fast conveyor belt and cited RLWRLD's claim of an 86.8% success rate at handling objects in its own tests; a later attempt to pick a smartphone off the same belt missed, sending a person scrambling.
The policy push reaches beyond the ballroom. According to a news report, MSIT on Sept. 16 kicked off research and development on physical AI for manufacturing sites in Jeonbuk and South Gyeongsang. It budgeted about 736.8 billion won over five years in Jeonbuk for a software platform to coordinate factory work, and about 676.3 billion won in South Gyeongsang for a human-AI collaborative large action model, an AI system meant to work alongside people. Together that is roughly 1.41 trillion won through 2030. That program runs apart from the summit, but it is the industrial push the Seoul agenda is meant to take to an international audience.
The program set Day Two, Sept. 23, for talks on industrial-scale deployment. Without named sites and timelines that outsiders can check, the summit's talk of industry is not proof that fully autonomous humanoids are at work in Korean factories. Nor does a policy briefing show whether the ministry's plans will turn into government purchasing, access to test sites or export standards, or whether ROBOTIS's open platform and RLWRLD's pitch for general-purpose robot AI will move factory robots beyond remote control and preset routines.