Robros
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| Robros | |
|---|---|
| General information | |
| Founded | 2022 |
| CEO | Ryan Ro |
| Headquarters | Seongdong-gu, Seoul, South Korea |
| Industry | Robotics, Humanoid robots |
| Products | IGRIS-C humanoid robot, automated cafe robots |
| Total funding | ~$4.14 million (Crunchbase) |
| Employees | 40+ |
| Website | robros.co.kr |
Robros (Korean: 로브로스) is a South Korean robotics company headquartered in the Seongdong district of Seoul. The company develops humanoid robots and service-robot platforms, with a stated mission of "blurring the boundaries between humans and robots" through automation in the service industry and research markets. Robros first attracted attention with its automated cafe baristas Mixie and Porty, which were deployed in 2023 in the company's flagship Better Than Yours unmanned cafe in eastern Seoul. In 2024 and 2025 the firm pivoted toward general-purpose humanoid hardware with the IGRIS-C, a mid-size bipedal platform that won first place in bipedal walking and static obstacle avoidance at the 24th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids 2024).[1][2][3]
Robros is a member of the K-Humanoid Alliance, a government-backed Korean consortium launched in April 2025 with the goal of building a national humanoid hardware and AI stack by 2028. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 2026, Robros exhibited IGRIS-C at the alliance's HUMANOID M.AX pavilion in Las Vegas, where it presented the platform to potential overseas customers in North America and Europe.[1][4]
Robros was founded in 2022 in Seoul by Ryan Ro, who serves as the company's chief executive officer. The startup was conceived as a service-robotics company at a time when South Korea's hospitality and food-service sector was under acute labor pressure, with rising minimum wages and a shrinking pool of part-time workers. Robros set out to design end-to-end automation systems in which robots could not only perform individual tasks but also coordinate with each other to operate an entire small business with minimal human intervention.[3][5]
In its first year of operation the company focused on cafe automation, prototyping a pair of complementary arm robots that could share workspace and divide the labor of preparing hot and cold beverages. Engineering work concentrated on the integration of off-the-shelf collaborative arms with proprietary control software, ordering kiosks, ingredient dispensers, and an inventory-management back end. By the end of 2022 Robros had assembled a multidisciplinary team covering mechanical design, embedded software, control engineering, and industrial design.[5]
In 2023 Robros opened Better Than Yours, an unmanned cafe in the Seongsu neighborhood of eastern Seoul, as the public debut of its automation platform. The cafe was staffed entirely by two robots:
According to Robros, the two units could collaboratively produce more than seventy distinct recipes, with customers able to specify toppings, espresso strength, and additional shots through a self-service kiosk. The pricing engine calculated the cost of each drink down to the won based on the exact ingredients used. An iced coffee at Better Than Yours sold for 2,463 won (about US$1.79 at the time), compared with roughly 4,500 won at nearby human-staffed cafes. The store operated 24 hours a day, with approximately two hours of manual maintenance per day for cleaning and restocking. Robros stated that during quiet periods the robots would dance to the cafe's background music as a form of ambient entertainment.[5]
Better Than Yours subsequently won an iF Design Award 2024 in the Interior Architecture category, with a design team credited as Jinyoung Kim, Haelyeon Ra, and Mina Yun. The iF Design entry described the cafe as an "experiential venue" that combined low-cost vending economics with the spectacle of watching two robots collaborate in real time, and identified its target markets as Asia and North America.[6]
The early cafe work gave Robros direct field data on continuous-duty robot operation, human-robot interaction, and the engineering trade-offs between cost, reliability, and dexterity - experience that the company later applied to its full humanoid program.[3][5]
In parallel with its service-robot deployments Robros began developing a general-purpose humanoid platform. The result was IGRIS-C, a mid-size bipedal robot intended for research, embodied-AI experimentation, and light industrial work. According to the company, IGRIS-C was designed in-house across the full technology stack, from mechanical design and system integration through assembly, production, control software, and AI.[1]
IGRIS-C was entered in the bipedal walking and static obstacle avoidance category at the 24th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids 2024), held in late September 2024, where it placed first. The award validated the platform's locomotion controllers - developed using reinforcement learning in simulation - against international academic benchmarks and helped position Robros as a credible bipedal hardware vendor in a market dominated by larger Korean and U.S. firms.[1][2]
According to Crunchbase, Robros has raised approximately US$4.14 million in disclosed funding across early-stage rounds, with the most recent round - a Seed VC-II round of about US$2.9 million - closing approximately ten months prior to the early-2026 reporting date. Disclosed investors include HB Investment, Lotte Ventures, Stick Ventures, GS Retail, and STIC Ventures, plus several additional undisclosed participants. The mix of corporate investors (notably the convenience-store and retail conglomerate GS Retail and the consumer-goods group Lotte) reflects Robros's origins as a service-robotics company with strong commercial-deployment partners in Korean retail.[3][7]
On January 6, 2026 (Las Vegas local time), Robros exhibited IGRIS-C at the HUMANOID M.AX Alliance pavilion at the Consumer Electronics Show 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The booth was part of a coordinated showing by members of the Korean alliance, sharing floor space with peer companies including Rainbow Robotics, Holiday Robotics, and Doosan Robotics.[1][4]
At the show Robros demonstrated IGRIS-C under a safety harness on a tethered rig, focusing on bipedal walking, dexterous-hand manipulation, and the platform's imitation learning workflow. CEO Ryan Ro told reporters that the company would "pursue exports primarily to universities and research institutes in North America and Europe," framing IGRIS-C as a research-grade platform for embodied-AI labs that need a full humanoid body for data collection and policy training rather than building one in-house.[1]
IGRIS-C is Robros's flagship humanoid robot and the company's primary commercial offering as of 2026. The platform was launched as a research and industrial product in 2025 and is targeted at universities, government-funded research institutes, and applied-research groups in manufacturing and logistics.[1][2]
| Specification | Value |
|---|---|
| Height | 154 cm |
| Weight | 56-60 kg (sources vary) |
| Body DOF | 31 (excluding hands) |
| Hand structure | Tendon-driven |
| Hand DOF (active) | 6 motors per hand |
| Hand DOF (total) | 11 per hand including passive joints |
| Hand weight | ~300 g per hand |
| Hand payload | Up to 3 kg per hand |
| Maximum walking speed | 2.1 km/h |
| Maximum top speed | 3.6 km/h |
| Knee/hip pitch peak torque | Up to 150 N·m |
| Battery | 17,000 mAh / 48 V |
| Runtime | ~2 hours per charge |
| Structural material | Aluminium |
| Sensors | 2 RGB cameras, rear depth sensor, IMU, microphone, speaker |
| Compute | Intel Core i7 NUC + NVIDIA Jetson (Nano / Orin NX in current configuration) |
| Operating system | Linux |
| List price | ~US$110,000 |
| Sales launch | 2025 |
As reported by Humanoid.guide and the company's own product page, IGRIS-C uses an aluminium primary structure and 5-finger hands. The actuator strategy combines low-reduction-ratio (20:1 or less) quasi-direct-drive motors at the hip and knee - which provide up to 150 N·m of pitch torque for walking - with tendon-driven actuators in the hands. The tendon system routes cables from a small number of motors through coupled joints, allowing each ~300 g hand to grasp payloads up to 3 kg while remaining lightweight enough to mount at the end of a long arm.[1][2][8]
IGRIS-C carries two front-facing RGB cameras for stereo color vision and a rear-facing depth sensor, providing 360-degree situational awareness for indoor mobility. Onboard processing is split between an Intel Core i7 NUC, which handles general computation and locomotion control, and an NVIDIA Jetson module that runs perception and policy networks. The platform runs Linux and exposes interfaces compatible with common robotics frameworks for academic users.[1][2][8]
Locomotion on IGRIS-C is built around a reinforcement learning controller trained in simulation and transferred to hardware, with bipedal locomotion policies tuned for indoor surfaces and obstacle avoidance. For manipulation tasks, Robros uses an imitation learning workflow in which a human operator wears a "master hand" teleoperation rig, demonstrates a task multiple times, and then trains a policy that allows the robot to reproduce the behavior in similar environments. This workflow is a fit for Robros's stated target customers in embodied AI research, who use the robot as a hardware substrate for collecting data and validating policies rather than as a final-form factory automation product.[1][8]
Robros markets IGRIS-C as a universal humanoid platform for the "Physical AI era," with three primary use cases:
The company has stated that the design intentionally emphasizes a flatter head profile and compact proportions to reduce overhead-clearance issues in indoor research environments, and uses a deliberately simple face design to position IGRIS-C as a non-anthropomimetic research tool rather than a consumer-facing humanoid.[1][8]
Before the humanoid program, Robros's primary product was an automated-cafe stack centered on the Better Than Yours store concept. The system integrates two collaborative arm robots - Mixie and Porty - with a self-order kiosk, a beverage and ingredient dispensing system, an inventory back end, and a cleaning routine, packaged as a turnkey cafe deployment. Key operational characteristics include:
The cafe stack remains in operation and won an iF Design Award in 2024, but Robros has signaled in its CES 2026 communications that the humanoid program is now its primary growth vector.[1][6]
Robros describes its competitive position in terms of a "full-cycle technology stack": rather than focusing on a single layer - motors, control software, or AI - the company designs and integrates all of mechanical hardware, system integration, assembly and production, control firmware, and AI policies in-house. This vertical integration is presented as enabling tighter co-design between actuators, control loops, and learned policies, particularly for the high-torque hip and knee joints used in walking.[1]
The firm emphasizes three engineering themes across its product line:
This philosophy mirrors the broader Korean humanoid strategy articulated by the K-Humanoid Alliance, which prioritizes lightweight, sub-60-kg bodies with high degrees of freedom and shared AI foundation models over the heavier, more powerful platforms favored by some U.S. and Chinese competitors.[4]
Robros is one of approximately forty industrial and academic members of the K-Humanoid Alliance (also referred to as HUMANOID M.AX), launched on April 13, 2025 in Seoul. The alliance was inaugurated at a ceremony attended by more than 350 participants, including Korean Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy Ahn Duk-geun and Seoul National University President Yoo Hong-lim.[4]
The Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) is supporting the alliance with a planned investment of approximately US$770 million (KRW 1 trillion) through 2030, including roughly US$150 million (KRW 200 billion) allocated for 2025 alone for R&D, infrastructure, and shared testing facilities. By 2028 the alliance aims to deliver a shared "robot AI foundation model" for the Korean industry, lightweight humanoid hardware specifications (under 60 kg with 50+ degrees of freedom, 20+ kg payload, and 2.5+ m/s mobility), and dedicated humanoid-class semiconductors and batteries.[4]
IGRIS-C, at 56-60 kg and 31 body DOF, sits within the alliance's hardware envelope, and Robros's participation in the CES 2026 pavilion was an explicit element of the consortium's international-marketing strategy.[1][4]
Robros's peers within the K-Humanoid Alliance include Korean robotics companies such as Rainbow Robotics, Aeirobot, Holiday Robotics, We Robotics, BlueRobin, Angel Robotics, Neuromeka, LG Electronics, Doosan Robotics, and HD Hyundai Robotics, alongside semiconductor and battery suppliers Rebellions, DEEPX, SK On, LG Energy Solution, and Samsung SDI. Academic partners include Seoul National University, KAIST, Korea University, Yonsei University, and POSTECH.[4]
Industry analysts have classified Robros, alongside Holiday Robotics, Aeirobot, and WiRobot, as one of a cluster of newer Korean robotics startups building AI-driven general-purpose humanoid platforms - distinct from the more established legged-robot specialists like Rainbow Robotics. Coverage from regional outlets including AVING News, Seoulz, and Interact Analysis frames Robros as part of a broader Korean push into humanoid hardware that is leveraging the country's strengths in semiconductors, batteries, and consumer electronics rather than competing directly on raw scale with U.S. or Chinese humanoid programs.[1][9]
The Humanoids 2024 podium finish for IGRIS-C is regarded as one of the firm's strongest validating signals to date, as the IEEE-RAS Humanoids conference is one of the most established academic venues in the field. Combined with the iF Design Award 2024 for Better Than Yours, the company has now received recognition for both its hardware engineering and its industrial design within the same calendar year.[1][2][6]