en.Wedoany.com Reported - South Korean robotics company Newbility has unveiled its "Seongsu Physical Artificial Intelligence Center" and the production line for its autonomous mobile robot (AMR) "Newbie" in Seongsu-dong, Seongdong-gu, Seoul. The center relocated its production facilities from Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, to integrate manufacturing and R&D functions to accelerate new model development. The production line is divided into Line 1 and Line 2, responsible for producing Newbie's drive unit and installation unit, respectively. Each line can assemble 12 robots simultaneously, and it currently takes about 20 hours to assemble one Newbie.
The drive unit, equipped with 10 cameras for 360-degree environmental recognition, takes the longest to assemble. Finished products are shipped after passing quality inspection and camera calibration. The prototype of the next-generation robot "Nubee 2.0" is also placed on one side of the production line, undergoing repeated driving and rotation durability tests for up to 120 hours in the adjacent performance testing area.
Newbility CEO Kang Ki-hyuk stated that the center is an integrated facility combining production, R&D, testing, and data factory, with the core goal of accumulating physical data required for humanoid robot development while producing AMRs. Since 2019, the company has been developing the delivery robot Nubee, which has autonomously traveled a cumulative 146,721 kilometers in actual domestic and international service locations, equivalent to circling the Earth about 3.7 times. The visual and spatial perception data generated during driving amounts to approximately 145 million instances per year. The robot is currently collaborating with delivery platform Yogiyo to offer delivery services in some areas, continuously collecting six types of data—video, depth information, road segmentation, object recognition, distance estimation, and position estimation—through its five cameras. Even identical driving scenarios are subdivided into units such as pedestrians, vehicles, road surfaces, obstacles, and drivable areas to advance autonomous driving technology.
Currently, the center produces about 50 Nubee units per month. However, Newbility places greater emphasis on the modularization of the production process, planning to replicate existing factories through an OEM model to increase output as demand grows in the future. Kang emphasized that even if production is outsourced, the company must retain in-house process design and manufacturing technology, and is building a vertically integrated system from hardware design to service delivery.
Newbility plans to apply its self-developed autonomous driving platform "Newon" to delivery robots and upcoming humanoid robots. The company believes that ultimate competitiveness depends on how it addresses constantly emerging special situations (long-tail problems). Currently, the company is in the final stages of developing the hybrid humanoid robot "Billy," which combines an AMR, dual-arm robot, and payload, and is expected to be unveiled next month. Billy aims to stably carry No. 5 parcel boxes weighing about 15 kg and measuring 48×38×34 cm, and can operate elevators to reach higher floors. A manufacturing company is already validating a task: having Billy retrieve items from a second-floor warehouse, transport them to the first floor via elevator, and then move them outdoors.
The company has partnered with five companies to test Billy and plans to deploy about 10 robots to food processing plants, chemical handling sites, and logistics warehouses this year to collect physical data. Kang pointed out that real-world data ultimately determines the outcome of the robot foundation model race, and the company's strategy is to quickly deploy technology to the field to accumulate data and improve robots accordingly, rather than waiting for perfect technology. Global humanoid robot companies, such as Figure AI and Agility in the U.S., are investing in acquiring data from actual workplaces, and Newbility is adopting a similar strategy.
