HD Hyundai Robotics shows its first in-house dual-arm robot at the Daegu FIX expo

HD Hyundai Robotics unveiled an AI robot that works with two arms and fingers like a human at FIX 2026, the Future Innovation Technology Expo that opened at EXCO in Daegu on Oct 21 and runs to Oct 24. The company positions it against conventional industrial robots that repeat fixed motions, and the group describes it as its first internally developed dual-arm robot. HD Hyundai Robotics is also showing a new next-generation collaborative robot, the HDC35-18, at the same event.

The prototype is one piece of a larger plan. HD Hyundai is building what it calls the Future of Shipyard, or FOS, targeting 2030, and its stated purpose is to hand dangerous shipyard work such as welding and painting to robots. The company is assembling that capability from partners: joint development of a welding humanoid with the US firm Persona AI, a quadruped walking robot programme with Germany's Neura Robotics, and a roughly KRW 13 billion (about $9.66 million) investment in AIDIN Robotics, a force- and tactile-sensing specialist, to get hands that can do precise work.

The show is the platform test

Taking an in-house prototype to a regional expo, rather than announcing a shipyard deployment, sets the near-term expectation: the value on display is the platform that the partners' welding, walking and sensing systems can plug into, and the group's robotics subsidiary is the integrator. That is a different bet from buying a finished robot, and it keeps HD Hyundai exposed to whether its partners' hardware reaches production.

Shipyards are the hard version of the task

Welding a hull is high-mix, safety-critical work in an outdoor environment, which is further from a controlled factory cell than sorting totes or tending a machine tool. Hyundai Motor Group, the separate vehicle side of the group, is targeting factory deployment and volume production of Boston Dynamics' Atlas by 2028, so the group has two humanoid timelines running at once.

The checkpoint is whether the welding humanoid developed with Persona AI reaches a yard before the FOS target date of 2030, or whether the in-house prototype gets there first.