Rick Yoonhyuk Jang, Chief Robotics Officer at Rainbow Robotics, presents the company’s path from humanoids through industrial robots and back toward humanoid platforms at the Humanoids Summit.
Jang traces Rainbow Robotics to HUBO, which began in a KAIST lab about 22 years ago. The company was established 15 years ago, and HUBO became widely known after winning the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge. Jang says the company’s guiding principles are internalizing core technology, building robots for practical use, and working with sincerity.
Jang says winning a robotics competition did not make humanoids commercially viable, so Rainbow Robotics shifted toward collaborative robots. The company has sold more than 3,000 cobots to over 2,000 customers, and its robots are used in machine tending, assembly, welding, food and beverage, and medical applications. He credits field deployment, in-house software, and localized components with improving quality and supporting uptime.
Rainbow Robotics has applied its humanoid experience to quadrupeds, which it has developed since 2010, as well as autonomous mobile robots. Jang says the company is commercializing quadrupeds for defense and security and tailoring AMRs to corporate needs. Its autonomous mobile manipulators combine an AMR base with a cobot arm for manufacturing tasks that require precision.
Jang says Rainbow Robotics built the RBY1 prototype in 57 days using technologies it had developed in-house. The platform combines a mobile base, torso, and arms, and supports teleoperation for collecting task data and validating AI on a real robot. Jang reports that more than 150 units are set to ship in 2026, with its SDK and control APIs available on GitHub.
Jang describes the RBY2, planned for release in the first half of the following year, as an industrial model rather than a research platform. Rainbow Robotics is developing it for industrial safety certification and work alongside people, with software intended to help system integrators deploy it without complex AI models. Jang frames the company’s approach as building field-ready products and bringing those technologies back into more capable humanoids.
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경제 알려주는 고양이 examines Rainbow Robotics’ rise from KAIST’s HUBO project to Samsung’s largest-shareholder deal, tracing the company’s robotics, component manufacturing and business challenges.
A Zoom Vantage presenter discusses South Korea’s robotics landscape, from humanoid systems and research platforms to robots used in industry and public life.
