Neubility unveils Billy, a 16-joint wheeled semi-humanoid bound for a CJ food plant

Neubility, the Korean maker of the Neubie delivery and patrol robot, unveiled Billy on September 29, 2026: a semi-humanoid that puts a robotic upper body on a four-wheel drive base, with 16 degrees of freedom, five-fingered hands on both arms, a torso that rotates 360 degrees and a maximum height of 1,497 mm. It is in proof-of-concept (PoC) tests with four companies, and one unit is due to go into a CJ CheilJedang food factory, sorting ingredients, within 2026.

Why it matters: Billy is a bet that the hard part of a useful factory humanoid is getting to the right place in a building and handling what is there, not walking on two legs — and Neubility starts from a navigation stack it already runs on a commercial fleet.

What Billy is built to do

At the launch, Seoul Economic Daily reported, Billy drove forward about 4 metres, lifted boxes from a two-tier shelf 1.5 metres high and rotated its upper body 180 degrees to place them in a storage compartment on its rear. TechTimes describes that rear section as modular and swappable, so the same base can be reconfigured for different tasks, and reports that Billy navigates by visual SLAM on cameras alone, without lidar. Neubility says its AI recognises on-site equipment and where objects sit, and decides the task from that.

The company is explicit that the targets are modest. Digital Daily reported that Billy is meant to reach 30–40% of a human worker’s output in its first phase and 80–95% in its final phase, and to run four to six hours per deployment. Chief executive Kang Ki-hyuk framed the goal as the fastest route to commercialisation rather than a general-purpose humanoid that reproduces every human motion.

Why wheels, and why Neubility

Neubility’s argument is its fleet. Digital Daily put the Neubie base at more than 400 robots across more than 150 locations, with more than 140,000 km of cumulative autonomous driving. That is the stack Billy inherits. A wheeled base gives up stairs and steps; it carries its battery and payload without having to balance them, and for a factory floor or a warehouse aisle that is usually the better trade.

Billy joins a growing set of wheeled, dual-arm machines being pitched for real sites rather than demonstrations. Rainbow Robotics’ RB-Y1 is being tested in a Coupang fulfilment centre and now sits in SFA’s Asan demonstration centre, and in the US, Feather is selling a $29,990 wheeled dual-arm humanoid to developers. Neubility has not published a price for Billy.

What to watch

The CJ CheilJedang commitment is one robot, and the PoC economics depend on a price nobody has disclosed. A first-phase target of 30–40% of human output means a buyer is paying for a learning curve. The hundreds-of-units goal for the next one to two years is also large against the global record: our factory deployments tracker found no maker that has published a fleet above a few dozen units at any single site. See where Billy fits among Korea’s factory humanoid pilots.