The first commercial proving ground for solid-state batteries is looking less like a car lot and more like a humanoid torso. A news report that ran Sept. 27 to 28 quoted industry sources as saying Samsung SDI has officially designated robots as a primary use for the technology, with mass production targeted for the second half of 2027. Solid-state batteries have long been sold as the dream battery for electric cars, so a robots-first start is a real shift: robots need dense cells in a tight space, long stretches away from a charger and safer chemistry around people.
Samsung SDI executive Jangsuk Hyun said in a Sept. 21 interview that the company chose the robot market as the first target for its SolidStack all-solid-state batteries. Hyun described the plan as taking on early robot demand, getting manufacturing yields stable, setting standards and then expanding into EVs. Samsung SDI's own InterBattery 2026 announcement unveiled the SolidStack brand and showed a pouch-type sample cell in public, meant for AI-driven machines including humanoid robots and drones, with the same target of mass production in the second half of 2027.
The hardware logic is simple. An electric car can line its underbody with battery cells. A humanoid has roughly a torso-sized space for its battery and cannot stay plugged in. Today's humanoids run about two to four hours per charge, according to the same news report, which cites Tesla's Optimus Gen2 at roughly two hours on 2.3 kilowatt-hours (kWh) and Boston Dynamics' Atlas (Hyundai Motor Group owns most of Boston Dynamics) at roughly four hours on 3.7 kWh. Solid-state batteries' higher density and non-flammable electrolytes, the material that carries charge inside a battery, are pitched as the way to longer work away from the charger, beside people.
Cost still stands in the way. POSCO Research Institute estimates that early mass-production and pilot-stage solid-state batteries will cost $400 to $600 per kWh in 2027, and says prices need to fall to about $350 per kWh to keep the battery within roughly 15 percent of the cost of a $5,000 robot. Those figures are analyst estimates, not Samsung SDI guidance. South Korea's robots-first path contrasts with Japan, where Toyota and Idemitsu are working to an EV-first timeline for solid-state batteries.
A June 2026 perspective paper by Dongsoo Lee of Gachon University, published in a Frontiers journal, argues that talk about solid-state batteries has focused overwhelmingly on electric vehicles, and that robots are an unusually good fit for what the technology offers. Lee estimates that one commercial robot swapping batteries over seven to ten years would use 60 to 88 kWh in all, about as much as the entire battery of one passenger electric car. The second half of 2027 remains a company target, not shipping product.
Correction (Oct. 5): an earlier version credited the estimate of $400 to $600 per kWh in 2027 to SNE Research. POSCO Research Institute published that estimate; SNE Research has given the same range as the price at the time of its own report. The earlier version also said the estimate was about three to four times the price of common lithium iron phosphate batteries, a figure the institute does not give, and that comparison has been removed.