KAIST showcases future of physical AI with latest robotics innovations

Physical AI just left the screen and walked onto a stage in Daejeon. In this report from KAIST's "Physical AI KOREA 2026" event, a six-foot humanoid makes its entrance with a moonwalk, then shrugs off a 15-kilogram block — pushing, lifting and setting it back down without a single external camera in sight. Across the hall, another humanoid takes the ship captain's seat and, working with the ROK Navy, steers a vessel weighing 100,000 times its own body weight. Nothing is teleoperated: the walking humanoids and their four-legged companion use spatial AI plus Vision-Language-Action models to locate themselves, plan safe routes and act on their own, while a medical arm runs a thyroid scan and a wearable exoskeleton assists human gait. A compact, convincing look at how South Korea is turning embodied AI from demo reels into deployable machines. By: Arirang News, published on October 13, 2026.