Pushing, lifting, spelling: KAIST humanoid moves 35 kilos while walking
Researchers at Korea's KAIST show their humanoid v0.9: while walking it pushes up to 35 kilograms, lifts 20 kilograms and uses onboard cameras to arrange letter blocks spelling "KAIST".
Photo: U.S. Navy / Office of Naval Research / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain (cropped and resized)
Video: YouTube · KAIST DRCD Lab · youtube.com
The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has released a new video of its humanoid v0.9. In it, the robot pushes objects of up to 35 kilograms while walking and lifts loads of up to 20 kilograms. As a task, it arranges large letter blocks to spell "KAIST" – guided by its own onboard cameras, without external motion capture.
The robot was developed by Professor Hae-Won Park's DRCD lab, which developed the robot including its own actuators, and Jemin Hwangbo's RAILAB, which was responsible for the upper body and arms. A unified controller coordinates legs and arms at the same time. The skills were created using deep reinforcement learning combined with human motion data as a template.
The previous version, v0.7, was unveiled in March 2026 and ran at up to 12 km/h. Specialist media point out that pushing and lifting differ in difficulty and that the figures are not certified payload ratings. With 20 kilograms of lifting capacity, v0.9 meets one of the Korean humanoid alliance's targets for 2028, according to Tech Times.
Sources
- Tech Times – KAIST Humanoid Pushes Objects Up to 77 Lbs While Walking, No External Cameras (20.10.2026)
- Humanoids Daily – From Moonwalking to Heavy Lifting: KAIST Humanoid v0.9 Moves 35 kg Objects (19.10.2026)
- Interesting Engineering – Humanoid robot pushes 77-pound loads and lifts 44 pounds in new demo video (20.10.2026)