Hyundai Motor Group is reshuffling its organization to strengthen its competitiveness in physical artificial intelligence, while accelerating efforts to build a physical AI alliance with Nvidia.
According to industry sources on April 29, Hyundai Motor will move its Robotics Lab — currently under the R&D division focused on vehicle hardware development — to the Advanced Vehicle Platform (AVP) division, which oversees future mobility technologies.
The Robotics Lab will be led by Park Min-woo, president and head of the AVP division. Park joined Hyundai Motor Group in January after building experience at Nvidia and Tesla in autonomous driving, AI models, computer vision, sensor fusion and machine learning.
A Hyundai Motor official said the change is intended to strengthen synergy among robotics, autonomous driving and AI technologies and to improve cross-organization collaboration efficiency.
Analysts said the reshuffle signals Hyundai’s push to shift more decisively toward physical AI. They said a leadership change was needed to commercialize products developed by the Robotics Lab, including the industrial robot “X-ble Shoulder” and the small mobility platform “MobED.” Hyun Dong-jin, an executive director who has overseen Robotics Lab development for the past 12 years, is reported to be stepping down.
Separately, the day before, Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chairman Chung Euisun met with Madison Huang, senior director of Omniverse and robotics product marketing at Nvidia and the eldest daughter of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. They discussed ways to strengthen a next-generation physical AI partnership spanning semiconductors, mobility and robot platforms. Hyundai and Nvidia have recently expanded their technology alliance from software-defined vehicles to humanoid robots, in what the industry views as a strategic move to secure an early lead in physical AI standards.
Hyundai is adopting Nvidia’s DRIVE Hyperion platform to build an integrated autonomous driving architecture that can scale from Level 2 and above advanced driver-assistance systems to Level 4 robotaxis. Affiliate Boston Dynamics has installed Nvidia’s robotics AI computing platform, Jetson Thor, on its humanoid robot Atlas. The companies are also developing a robotics foundation model aimed at enabling robots to understand and follow human language and actions without programming.
In the meeting, Huang was also reported to have explored a practical cooperation model combining Nvidia’s Omniverse robot simulation platform with Hyundai’s robot hardware.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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