SEOUL, December 10 (AJP) - A discussion on the growing convergence of robotics and artificial intelligence drew a full audience at COMEUP 2025, South Korea's largest annual startup festival, on Wednesday, as two South Korean robotics entrepreneurs described how so-called "physical AI" is reshaping the sector and opening new markets for humanoid machines.
The session, titled "Physical AI: Where Robotics Meets Intelligence," brought together ROBOTIS CEO Kim Byoung-soo and RLWRLD CEO Ryu Jung-hee. The two spoke candidly about the rapid shift taking place as robots move from rule-based industrial systems to AI-driven platforms capable of learning, perception, and autonomous action.
Kim, who operates ROBOTIS, well-known for developing actuators widely used by robotics researchers, said the past year marked a major turning point. "Robots used to operate only on rule-based models inside factories," he said. "With AI attached, people now expect robots to move with real intelligence." He noted that demand for actuators is expanding beyond universities to AI labs and large companies investing in next-generation robotics.
Ryu, formerly a venture investor, said he launched RLWRLD after realizing South Korea lacked a company building a foundation model for robotics. He described his team’s work on a "large vision-language-action model" that must interpret images, understand speech, and output robotic movements rather than text. "Human-level datasets for robots do not exist on the web," he said. "We have to create large amounts of data ourselves, and nobody yet knows the perfect model structure."
The two speakers invited the audience to participate in real-time polls using colored lights attached to their seats. Most attendees said they expect humanoid robots to be working in homes within ten years, and an overwhelming majority predicted that South Korean companies will play an important role in the humanoid market alongside the United States and China.
Kim said the industrial robot market, despite its long history, has a large room to grow once robots move out of factory lines. He pointed to global manufacturers already requesting robots that can be trained with long hours of data, adding that securing data and infrastructure has become a critical part of competition.
Ryu said early demand for humanoids is strongest not in manufacturing but in service sectors such as convenience stores, hotels and logistics. "These are places that cannot relocate their operations abroad," he said. "Many of them told us they were waiting for humanoids with real AI."
The speakers also discussed the challenges facing Korean robotics startups, including capital gaps with U.S. competitors and the difficulty of scaling data collection. Ryu noted that his one-year-old company is raising funds at a relatively high valuation by Korean standards, while comparable U.S. robotics-AI firms have reached multibillion-dollar levels.
Both agreed that South Korea’s manufacturing expertise and its growing mix of hardware and AI companies allow it to compete in the emerging physical-AI field. Kim closed with a message to younger founders, warning against losing focus when investment becomes easier. "Stay with your original mission," he said. "Robotics and AI require discipline, not distractions."
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