Humanoid Display HMI: Korea – Standards, Systems, and Corporate Roadmap

Amidst the rapidly evolving global competition surrounding humanoid robots and displays, this series examines the role of displays and market outlook for human-machine interfaces (HMIs) for humanoid robots, by region. This installment focuses on Korea, examining HMI prospects, domestic standards, regulatory trends, and the activities of major companies like Hyundai, LG, and Samsung, along with specific robot case studies. Subsequent articles will cover China, the US, and Europe, with comparative analysis.

As humanoid robots expand into industry, services, and homes, the role of displays in HMI is expanding beyond simple information display to encompass trust, safety, and emotional interaction. As input channels, including voice, gesture, eye tracking, and tactile feedback, become more diverse, the importance of visual feedback—enabling users to immediately understand the robot’s status and intent—increases. Particularly in environments where people move alongside robots in the same space, functions such as mode switching, hazard warnings, next-action previews, remote control status, user authentication, and privacy are simultaneously required. In these situations, displays are no longer merely a “pretty UI,” but rather a crucial component of safety design. Humanoid robots present inherent risks such as falls, collisions, and entrapment. Furthermore, demands for visibility of warnings, minimal display delays, standardized icons and text, and synchronization with remote control are likely to intensify, preventing user misunderstandings in the event of power outages or control errors.

Applications are expected to broadly categorize into four categories. First, the emotional communication display, which serves as the “face” of the robot, will become a key interface for fostering intimacy and trust through facial expressions, status, and conversational assistance information. Second, auxiliary displays located throughout the body, such as the chest, arms, wrists, and waist, will handle function-focused UIs such as work instructions, progress, warnings, and access restrictions, significantly impacting efficiency in industrial, logistics, and hospital settings. Third, portable and foldable panels can be integrated with robots for remote operation, training, and customer service. Fourth, projection and AR integration can emerge as alternatives that reduce reliance on the robot’s own screen while ensuring on-site visibility. This differentiation will concretize robot-specific CTQs, and requirements such as low-power, always-on display, outdoor visibility, impact-resistant covers, surface treatment for contamination and disinfection, and minimizing optical interference with sensors are likely to become increasingly apparent.

Korea’s standards and regulatory trends can be summarized as a combination of service robot safety, collaborative safety, and functional safety. As humanoids operate in the same space as humans, safety requirements expand beyond the robot’s mechanisms and controls to include HMI design that accurately communicates risks to users. Therefore, establishing a consistent display system that ensures users immediately understand information such as emergency stops, access restrictions, operating modes, abnormal conditions, and remote operation becomes crucial. A standardized warning user experience is directly linked to product reliability during validation, procurement, and overseas expansion.

Companies are typically categorized as Hyundai, LG, and Samsung, each leveraging their respective core industries and representative robot platforms to expand their HMI experiences into “field-based,” “service-based,” and “ecosystem-based” categories. Hyundai, for its part, prioritizes safety and operational efficiency, leveraging platforms like Boston Dynamics’ Atlas and Spot, focusing on manufacturing, logistics, and field deployment scenarios. In this case, the HMI’s weight is increasing on the function-oriented UI, such as displaying work status, work instructions, hazard warnings, access restrictions, and remote control mode, rather than on full-scale emotional expression. Also, the display, like the battlefield components, is expected to have long-term reliability, durability in shock and polluted environments, and safe display in failure mode as key requirements.

LG is well-positioned to focus on “friendly communication” in the service and home sectors, leveraging its experience with robot concepts like CLOi and CLOiD. User acceptance hinges on facial expressions, guidance, and conversation assistance via the front display, while operational UX, including content templates and remote updates, provides a competitive edge. Samsung’s strategy of integrating robots into a hub for multi-device experiences, based on mobile, wearable, and smart home platforms, could be a strength. For example, the robot screen could focus on explanations, guidance, and status displays, while smartphones, TVs, and tablets could handle large-screen control UIs such as settings, permission management, and remote control. Furthermore, the trend of accumulating domestic robot experiences, such as Ballie and the Samsung Bot series, extends to humanoids, sharing the common goal of “user-friendly, status visualization UI.” Consequently, all three companies are moving beyond displays as standalone components to become core elements of an integrated HMI competition encompassing safety, UX, durability, content, and connectivity.

UBI Research Executive Vice President Changwook Han said about this trend, “As humanoid robots move towards coexistence with humans, HMI will go beyond a competition of functions and become a competition of trust. Users must immediately understand what the robot is doing, why it is doing it, and whether it is safe. At that point, the display is not just a screen; it is the robot’s expression and a safety sign. Korean companies’ strengths in display, UX, and manufacturing reliability will become key catalysts for the industrialization of humanoids.”

Changwook Han, Executive Vice President/Analyst at UBI Research (cwhan@ubiresearch.com)

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