From providing information in various languages at Incheon Airport and offering water bottles in Pyeongchang at the Winter Games to skiing down the slopes, the tasks they performed were part of South Korea's efforts to project itself on the robotics map. And they 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.

Product:

• Country: South Korea 
• Company: KAIST