Winter Olympics, Hubo and future of robots in South Korea

Daejeon, South Korea - During the 2018 Winter Olympics, South Korea deployed 85 robots of 11 different kinds at various locations. From providing information in various languages at Incheon Airport and offering water bottles in Pyeongchang at the Winter Games to skiing down the slopes, South Korea's efforts to showcase itself on the robotics map did not go unnoticed. One of those 85 robots was Hubo, a humanoid created by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, just over 130km from the capital Seoul. In December 2017, Hubo became the first robot to carry an Olympic flame. It walked around 150 metres to a wall before drilling a hole into it and passing the torch onto Professor Oh Jun-Ho, its creator and the person who headed the robotics programme at Pyeongchang 2018.