Korea is writing a Mobile Robot Special Act — and the target is buildings, not roads

Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said on August 12, 2026 that it would brief industry the following day on a draft “Special Act on the Safe Use and Commercialisation of Mobile Robots.” The briefing took place on August 13 at the Startup Campus in Pangyo Techno Valley, Seongnam, and MOLIT said it is pursuing enactment in cooperation with the National Assembly.

The ministry defines a mobile robot broadly: a machine that drives autonomously or is moved remotely through indoor and outdoor space to perform delivery, parking, EV charging, transport, security or maintenance work. That definition is doing real work in the bill, because it pulls the category out of the road-traffic frame and into the built environment.

What the bill actually changes

MOLIT’s stated position is that mobile robot technology is advancing quickly but commercialisation requires the spaces and infrastructure the robots run through to be re-regulated. The act would revise space and facility rules that do not contemplate robots, and create the legal basis and special exemptions for robot use in buildings, apartment complexes, car parks, outdoor space and construction sites. The purpose is explicit: move mobile robots out of restricted demonstration zones and into everyday living space.

The second half is safety. The bill would set operating and safety-management standards that vary by the space and the sector, clarify responsibility and response when an accident happens, and stand up a separate accident-investigation system.

Attendance is the other tell. Forty-three companies plus the Korea Institute of Robotics & Technology Convergence were at the briefing, among them Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motor, NAVER, Hyundai E&C, Hyundai Engineering, Rainbow Robotics and Doosan Robotics. That is the robot makers and the people who own the buildings, in the same room, on the same bill.

Why it matters

Every Korean delivery-robot pilot of the last three years has run into the same wall, and it is not perception. It is a lift that will not talk to the robot, a car park with no legal basis for an unattended machine, and a construction site where nobody can say who is liable when the robot clips a worker. Those are property and facility questions, and they sit with MOLIT rather than with the industry ministry.

Minister Kim Yoon-deok put it directly: however far mobile robot technology advances, if the machine cannot move freely and deliver a service in real living space, it does not become a business. Korea has spent two years funding the robots. This bill is about the buildings they have to work in.