AI technology company Crowdworks said on March 25 it signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with physical AI company XYZ to build robot training data and cooperate on related business.

XYZ is a specialised company in autonomous driving and foodtech robots and provides robots designed for everyday use. The two companies are also jointly participating in a project to develop a proprietary AI foundation model under the Motif Technology Consortium.

Physical AI hinges on combining robot hardware, AI models and data, but it is difficult for a single company to handle all of those, it said. Demand is therefore growing for cooperation between robot makers and data companies.

The companies will combine XYZ's robot hardware capabilities with Crowdworks' data processing capabilities to standardise behaviour data. They plan to precisely refine collected behaviour data into a form optimised for robot learning, creating technical synergy from securing data through to strengthening robot intelligence.

They will also expand cooperation on government-led AI and robotics projects. They plan to jointly pursue building a robot data ecosystem and identifying distribution models, and to gradually broaden the scope of cooperation to include consulting and industrial training based on their expertise.

A Crowdworks official said, "A common concern among robot companies we met in the field is securing high-quality data." The official added, "We will rapidly transplant our data-building capabilities into physical AI and contribute to making South Korea's robot industry more intelligent."