South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT formed a "strategy consultative body for humanoids at government-funded research institutes" in Daejeon on Feb. 27 and held its first meeting, attended by officials from major government-funded research institutes.

The body was launched to respond to the growth of the global humanoid market by bringing together research capabilities at government-funded research institutes that have been pursued in a dispersed manner, and to secure national technological competitiveness early.

The government has selected humanoids as a core mission proposal for the nationwide "K-Moonshot" project and decided to fully launch a one-team system that ties together the research capabilities of government-funded research institutes.

To strengthen expertise, the consultative body will operate around 3 core areas: intelligence, body and data. In the initial stage, it will be run mainly by key experts from major government-funded research institutes, but it will later expand into an open cooperation system with broad participation from academia and industry.

At the meeting, participants discussed how to build data and use it jointly, a key element in advancing humanoid intelligence, and confirmed plans for the body's structure and operations. They agreed to actively share and link useful data held separately by each institution within the framework of the body. They also shared a sense of urgency about building infrastructure to boldly generate currently lacking key data and manage it in an integrated manner.

Starting with this kickoff meeting, the ministry plans to draw up detailed execution plans by subcommittee and reflect them in identifying joint cooperation tasks among government-funded research institutes and planning new projects in the first half of this year.