LG Electronics (066570), Nota (486990) and Mobilint will jointly develop a humanoid robot powered by a domestically produced neural processing unit (NPU).
Nota said on the 8th that it had been selected as the lead institution for the third subproject in the humanoid category of the K On-Device AI Semiconductor Technology Development Program, run by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and the Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology (KEIT).
The program aims to develop an autonomous humanoid capable of performing human-level tasks using Korean-made AI chips. LG Electronics will oversee the entire project and develop the humanoid robot system. Mobilint will supply the NPU installed in the robot. Nota will develop optimization software that runs AI models on the NPU and within the robot's operating environment. Its role is to optimize the vision-language-action (VLA) model embedded in the humanoid robot to the specifications of Mobilint's NPU, drawing on techniques such as token compression, quantization, pruning and knowledge distillation.
A humanoid robot with an embedded VLA model can recognize its surroundings and act without relying on external servers. Cutting back on data exchanges with outside servers minimizes communication latency and improves real-time control performance. Reducing the transmission of sensitive data externally also strengthens security. The model's computational efficiency improves as well, lowering power consumption.
"Starting with humanoid robots, we will expand business opportunities across industries that need real-time on-device AI, including various robots, automobiles and industrial equipment," said Chae Myung-soo, chief executive of Nota.
