LG targets 500,000 hours of robot training data and puts home humanoids last, around 2030

LG Electronics is building about 500,000 hours of robot training data with NVIDIA, combining real and simulated data, Lee Jae-mo, its head of robotics strategy, said on the company's third-quarter earnings call on Oct 28. In August, LG put its year-end figure at 100,000 hours. Seoul Economic Daily and Aju Business Daily report the new number as this year's goal, which Seoul Economic Daily calls a fivefold increase; Green Economy Newspaper reports it as a goal for next year.

The same call put the home at the end of LG's robot plan. LG will "focus first on manufacturing, where the market is expected to form first," Lee said, and expand into home humanoids "around 2030, when humanoid robots really take off." LG introduced its CLOiD home robot loading a washing machine at CES in January. Its plan now starts with parts, data and factory robots, and the home humanoid comes last.

Real hours from a mock home, the rest from NVIDIA's simulators

The hours come from LG's Data Factory on its former Yangjae R&D campus in Seoul, a four-floor, 10,000-square-meter building where CLOiD robots clean a mock home and move and assemble parts on a copy of LG's Tennessee washing-machine line, according to LG's August release. Data collected there is expanded into synthetic data with NVIDIA's Omniverse, Cosmos and Isaac tools and used to train LG's robot foundation model. LG says the site has begun partial operations, and CFO Kim Chang-tae said it will run fully in the fourth quarter.

Lee said the data will go to LG's own robots first, and paid testing for outside customers is a medium- to long-term option. LG lists three business models: research robots sold as single devices, industry-specific hardware and software packages built with system integrators, and selling data and building data sets from the Data Factory.

Actuators ship before households buy

The first products are parts. LG built an actuator pilot line in Changwon in the first half, according to Green Economy Newspaper, and its earnings release says mass-production preparations are on plan while LG pursues orders from prospective global customers. Seoul Economic Daily reports that LG is also developing a bipedal humanoid with NVIDIA, which it aims to unveil in the first quarter of next year.

For the home, Lee set a price condition. The market opens when humanoids reach "a price households can actually consider buying," he said, and LG sees room in "robots designed for appliances and appliances designed for robots."

The strongest case against this reading is LG's own earlier timetable. In July, the Korea Herald reported that LG planned to commercialize CLOiD as a home robot next year, and in June The Investor reported a target of a commercial home robot by 2028. If either ships before 2030, the 2030 date covers only a full home humanoid, and LG's home business starts well before its earnings call suggested.