Samsung Establishes Physical AI Lab, Deepening Humanoid Robot Strategy
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Samsung Electronics has opened a Physical AI Lab focused on AI-driven control and whole-body motion for humanoid robots, extending its robotics strategy from hardware investment into in-house AI — a move that upgrades the company from building robots to teaching them how to think and move.
What does this lab actually work on?
The Physical AI Lab sits inside Samsung's Robot Experience (RX) business unit. It evolved from an earlier "Future Robot AI Group" and is led by Koo Dong-han, a KAIST mechanical-engineering PhD who previously worked on walking robots at Hyundai Motor.
Research spans whole-body control, motion planning, object manipulation, reinforcement learning, and imitation learning — in plain terms = teaching a robot to understand spoken commands and decide its own movements.
Two core capabilities stand out: converting natural-language instructions into full-body motion, and letting a robot automatically adjust its posture based on the weight of what it carries. This means → the robot shifts from executing fixed routines to a "perceive-judge-act" loop.
Some of this technology has already been tested in real-world settings on humanoid robots made by China's Unitree Robotics.
What does Samsung's robotics org chart look like?
RX (Robot Experience) was formally established on July 21, led by Samsung Electronics co-CEO TM Roh. It oversees long-term strategy, core technology, and commercialization.
The unit has three pillars: the Physical AI Lab for AI and control tech, a Robot Strategy Team for direction-setting, and a dexterous-hand team tackling the hardest part of a humanoid — the hands.
This means → Samsung has consolidated scattered robotics research into a single business unit with direct CEO oversight. The signal is clear: this is a company-level bet, not a lab experiment.
What do Rainbow Robotics' financials reveal?
Samsung holds a 35% stake in Rainbow Robotics, making it the largest shareholder. In H1 2026, Rainbow's mobile humanoid robot segment posted revenue of KRW 8.65 billion, accounting for 40.48% of total sales — now its biggest product category.
Sales to Samsung Electronics reached KRW 5.68 billion, nearly triple the KRW 1.92 billion in the year-ago period.
In plain terms = humanoid robots are no longer just a slide-deck concept — they are Rainbow's largest revenue source. The product is still at R&D-and-demo stage, but real money is already flowing.
Why is the factory floor the first battleground?
Samsung plans to convert its domestic and overseas plants into AI-driven factories by 2030, deploying digital twins and AI agents across production, equipment management, quality, and logistics — with humanoid manufacturing robots phased in over time.
Three robot types are envisioned: production-equipment operators, material-transport logistics bots, and assembly robots — covering the full factory workflow from hauling to assembly.
This means → factories are the natural first deployment: controlled environments, repetitive tasks, and wide error margins make them far lower-risk than open-world settings.
What is Samsung's full picture?
In-house AI and control tech (Physical AI Lab) + robot hardware platform (Rainbow Robotics) + mass-production and data infrastructure (Gumi factory and robot data factory) — three layers, now in place.
Samsung is also positioning its semiconductor lineup — HBM, low-power memory, on-device AI processors, image sensors, foundry, and advanced packaging — as the compute foundation for physical AI.
In plain terms = Samsung's ambition goes beyond "building robots." It wants to own the entire chain from chip to brain to body to factory. This reflects a deeper strategic logic: whoever commands the full stack from silicon to steel holds the ticket to the next era of manufacturing.
Content is for reference only, not financial advice.