Humanoids Summit Seoul: ROBOTIS targets 10,000 AI Sapiens a year as NVIDIA readies GR00T 2

At the first Seoul edition of Humanoids Summit, held at COEX on September 22–23, 2026, ROBOTIS said it aims to expand production of its AI Sapiens humanoid from 2027, targeting about 10,000 units a year. NVIDIA said it plans to release an early-access version of its next robot foundation model, GR00T 2, within months.

Why it matters: ROBOTIS already sells actuators to other humanoid makers. A 10,000-unit target would make it a volume humanoid maker as well, and its plan to open the design would put its parts inside other companies’ robots.

What is Humanoids Summit Seoul?

It is the fifth edition of a conference series founded and chaired by Modar Alaoui. Earlier editions were held in Silicon Valley (from 2024), London and Tokyo; the organiser says the Tokyo edition in May 2026 drew more than 2,000 attendees from over 30 countries. Seoul’s Ministry of Science and ICT officially supported the event, and Second Vice Minister Ryu Je-myung gave the opening remarks. NewDaily counted about 30 participating companies and institutions. Among them were NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Amazon Web Services, Rainbow Robotics, Unitree Robotics and ROBOTIS. Persona AI chief executive Nic Radford gave a keynote, and RLWRLD was the event’s domestic technical partner.

When can you buy the ROBOTIS AI Sapiens humanoid?

ROBOTIS told Sisa Journal-e on September 7 that official sales of the bipedal AI Sapiens K1 start in November 2026. Initial capacity is about 10 units a month, the first saleable units are already reserved, and early sales are limited to Korean universities and research institutes. At the summit, Money Today reported the company’s aim to scale production from next year to about 10,000 units a year. NewDaily’s account of the same talk put sales of the K1 and its dedicated actuators in early 2027. ROBOTIS plans to release the hardware designs, operating software and simulation tools openly. Chief executive Kim Byung-soo described the humanoid as a platform like a smartphone: one machine that does many tasks, rather than a hundred robots for a hundred jobs.

The larger number sits in actuators. ROBOTIS told Sisa Journal-e it will begin partial production at a new plant in Uzbekistan in October, reach 1 million actuators a year of capacity in 2027 and expand to 5 million a year by 2031. For context on where that leaves ROBOTIS among Korean companies, see our ranking of Korea’s physical AI firms.

What did NVIDIA show about GR00T N1.7 and GR00T 2?

NVIDIA presented Isaac GR00T N1.7, its current open vision-language-action model for humanoids. It also set out a “data pyramid” that mixes real robot data, simulated and synthetic data, and human demonstration data. GR00T 2, according to Money Today, is meant to learn by predicting how its surroundings will change in response to its own actions.

The joint NVIDIA–ROBOTIS session gave a concrete example. A grasping model trained on 268 demonstrations mistook the shadow of the robot’s own hand for an object. ROBOTIS used NVIDIA’s Cosmos Transfer to generate 300 synthetic variants with altered lighting and backgrounds. After that, the robot handled the shadows and could re-grasp objects it had dropped. It is a small case, but it shows where synthetic data can fix a narrow failure cheaply.