[E-Daily Reporter Kwon Oh Seok ] AI (Artificial Intelligence) specialist company LaonPeople Inc.(300120)has been selected for a major national project in the field of Physical AI, led by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA), and will begin developing the “AI brain”—the core component of unmanned factories.

LaonPeople Inc. announced on the 3rd that it has been officially selected as the implementing agency for the “Research and Development of a Specialized Model for Unmanned Factory Operations—Physical AI SDF (Software-Defined Factory)” project, part of the “Creation of an R&D Ecosystem for Collaborative Intelligence Physical AI-Based Software Platforms” initiative.
This project is being conducted as a consortium led by Chonbuk National University, with a total of 15 industry, academic, and research institutions participating, including LaonPeople Inc. and NC AI. With a total budget of 70.2 billion won over five years through 2030, it is the largest government-funded project in Korea’s Physical AI sector.
The core objective of the project is to develop a “Physical AI Foundation Model” for unmanned factory operations. The AI model to be developed will serve as the “brain of the factory,” autonomously assessing variable on-site conditions—such as production bottlenecks or equipment failures—in real time to adjust task assignments and production schedules. The technology developed through this project is scheduled to be applied across seven sectors, including the production lines of three manufacturing companies, such as automotive manufacturers.
Within the consortium, LaonPeople Inc. is responsible for implementing and validating practical AI technologies—such as anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, and process optimization—to enable the application of the Physical AI Foundation Model to automotive parts and robotics factories.
Building on this project, the company plans to accelerate the commercialization of Physical AI—where robots “see, judge, and move”—by integrating its proprietary Visual Language Model (VLM) and Agent AI technologies into the robotics sector. Specifically, the company intends to develop an “Edge AI Board”—an on-device solution that allows VLM and Agent AI to be directly embedded in robots—and widely supply it to the industrial robotics market.
Physical AI is a technology that enables AI to directly perceive and act within the physical world—such as through robots and equipment—and is regarded as a key driver of the next generation that will enable full automation across the entire production process.
LaonPeople Inc. official emphasized the company’s ambitions, stating, “We are uniquely positioned as a company with comprehensive capabilities in industrial AI vision inspection, VLM, and agent-based autonomous decision-making,” and added, “Through this government project, we will secure proof-of-concept references and directly target the global manufacturing Physical AI market beyond Korea.”