Index Robotics Approaches the Essence of Humanoids with Precision

1. CEO Shin Seung-hoon: A person obsessed with design

There was a child who, as an elementary school student, received a Lego car worth 300,000 won as a gift and stayed up all night assembling it. In middle school, he participated in the Science Kit competition every year, and in college, he personally formed and flew a DIY drone team. After joining the KAIST HUBO Lab, he spent eight years pursuing his master's and doctoral degrees designing and manufacturing at least three robot systems from A to Z, including hydraulic quadruped robots. He is a person who has repeatedly gone through the process of assembling 2,000 to 3,000 parts—including bolts, and 200 to 300 pieces that he personally designed and outsourced for manufacturing—to form a single module.

CEO Shin Seung-hoon is that kind of person.

My first impression upon meeting CEO Shin was that he is addicted to the very act of "design." Even now, he stays up all night at least once a week, and he says he stays up all night designing more often than manufacturing. His statement that he is happiest when creating something is consistently confirmed throughout his entire life. While most robot companies purchase actuators externally and assemble the system, CEO Shin held the conviction that "we must build the actuators ourselves no matter what." His reasoning is that only by doing so can the problems inherent in large robot systems be solved from the ground up. CEO Shin Seung-hoon is a man with the tenacity to redesign the same parts hundreds of times for the sake of quality.

2. Sim2Real gap and ultra-precision work

Why are humanoid robots not yet being used extensively in industrial settings? While there are several reasons, one of the most fundamental issues is the sim2real gap. This is a phenomenon where a robot that operates well in simulations experiences a decline in operational accuracy in real-world environments as errors accumulate over time.

In tasks such as walking or lifting objects, this gap is relatively small. However, in ultra-precision tasks such as threading a needle, connecting connectors, or performing millimeter-level precision assembly, the story is completely different. In fact, it is said that ultra-precision tasks like connecting connectors are representative tasks that robots cannot handle even in automobile factories.

This is precisely where Index Robotics focused. While most humanoid companies concentrated on creating demos for general-purpose tasks such as walking, lifting, and moving, Index targeted the market of precise manual labor—a market that no one has yet properly addressed. The fixed-body upper-body robot form factor is also an extension of this strategy. They did not abandon locomotion; rather, they chose a form that could create value "right now" in industrial settings.

3. Obsession with Backlash and Data Quality

So, where does the cause of the sim2real gap lie? The key lies in the 'backlash' of the gearbox. Backlash is a positional error caused by play between gears, which amplifies exponentially as it follows the robot's linkage structure toward the end. In the case of standard planetary gears, the backlash is in the range of 5 to 20 arcmin, which manifests as an error of several millimeters at the end of the robot arm. In precision assembly work, an error in the millimeter range means failure.

Index Robotics tackles this problem head-on with its proprietary actuators. While achieving planetary gear-level compliance and back-actuability, it minimizes positional errors by incorporating a backlash compensation mechanism. Furthermore, it combines a method that collects actuator data and corrects even residual errors through learning via neural network-based modeling.

CEO Shin Seung-hoon’s obsession with backlash is not merely to increase precision specifications. He repeatedly emphasizes that for AI software to operate better, the data quality must be good, and for data quality to be good, the hardware must be good. This means that consistent training sets with minimal error must be produced. This paradoxical insight—that hardware precision determines software intelligence—is the core of Index Robotics’ technology strategy.

4. Extreme optimization at the system level

What makes Index Robotics even more special is that the team optimizes the entire system, not just a single component.

Globally, there are only a handful of teams that design their own hardware to build robots. Most robot companies purchase commercial robots from vendors like Unitree to control them; however, this approach makes full access to all actuators impossible and limits detailed control at the motor level. Index Robotics develops everything in-house, from motors and reducers to motor drivers (circuits), firmware, and the OS. This means they can understand and control the robot from bottom to top.

This full-stack approach also shines in mass production design. We have completed a modular design that standardizes 80% of the internal components of various actuators and covers the entire joint with a small number of actuator types. The fact that a seed-stage company possesses such a detailed mass production scenario implies that the design was created with mass production in mind from the very beginning. Ultimately, the team's true competitive edge lies not in the performance of individual components, but in the fact that the entire chain—from motor to reducer to driver to controller—is optimized under a single design philosophy.

While many humanoid companies were attracting market attention with flashy demo videos, Index Robotics was engrossed in bringing reducer backlash close to zero. I believe this obsession behind the scenes will be the key factor determining whether or not robots can be used in actual industrial settings. The future of humanoids may depend not on walking, but on working with precision. I look forward to Index Robotics being the team that creates that answer.

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