Rainbow Robotics has sold out its first RB-Y2 humanoids, but certification sets the mid-2027 date

Rainbow Robotics, the Korean robot maker in which Samsung Electronics holds a 35% stake, has already sold 12 of its RB-Y2 wheeled humanoids this year, a company official told Robot Newspaper. The roughly 20 units in its first production run at the end of the year are all reserved, Green Economy Newspaper reports. Chief technology officer Heo Jung-woo told ZDNet Korea at RoboWorld 2026 in Goyang that full mass production should start "around June next year."

Buyers are not what sets that date. "For both the RB-Y1 and the RB-Y2, orders mostly exceed our production capacity, so we consider the market sufficiently proven," a Rainbow official told Green Economy Newspaper. Two approvals stand between the first batch and open sales. The RB-Y2 is going through industrial safety certification, and Rainbow has paused some export schedules over FCC certification and regulatory issues, the paper reports. The US is expected to be the robot's main market, because the RB-Y1 sold heavily there.

Buyers asked for the safety mark

The RB-Y2 is the industrial version of the RB-Y1 research robot: two arms and a lift on a wheeled AMR base, with each arm carrying 6 kg, twice the earlier model, according to ZDNet Korea. Its main target is logistics centers, where it would sort, load and move goods, Green Economy Newspaper reports. Rainbow builds its own motors, encoders and brakes, and has sold about 3,500 cobots, mostly in Korea.

RB-Y1 customers had asked for safety certification, and Rainbow has designed for it since early development, Asia Today reports. The paper cites industry norms of six months to a year to redesign a product for mass production after its debut, and about a year to certify it. Counted from the RB-Y2's debut at SIMTOS in April, those norms point to mid-2027 even if nothing goes wrong. At RoboWorld, Neuromeka presented its EIR as the first humanoid with an "industrial safety certification," Robot Newspaper reports, a sign that Korean makers now compete on that mark. Switzerland's Embodied AI is taking another route, designing its AIR to existing cobot rules.

The US review asks about owners and parts

The FCC step is slower to predict. In October, Green Economy Newspaper reported that Rainbow had applied for an export exemption for the RB-Y1 under FCC rules introduced in July. To get one, companies are said to file the nationality of shareholders owning 5% or more, the origin of every component, and plans for US production. The paper estimated the US at more than 10% of Rainbow's sales last year.

The strongest objection comes from Rainbow itself. The first batch is meant to prove the robot at customer sites, and Rainbow will fix the final mass-production schedule, and adjust the specification, only after that. Twenty robots outrunning capacity says little about demand at volume. June 2027 will show which one held the date back: if both approvals arrive and the line still waits, the robot was not ready.