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The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) will start developing citizens' robots with Germany's DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, a world-class robot arm research institute, as part of the Ministry of Information and Communication's (MIC) project to supply super-low priced robots, of which the prices are between 1 million won and 2 million won.
For this purpose, the Korean government and Germany will jointly invest 1.4 million Euros (The Korean government 1 million Euros and DLR 400,000 Euros) and set up the 'DLR-KIST Lab' in KIST's research center in Hongneung within this year.
On May 16, both the Ministry of Science and Technology and KIST confirmed that Guem Dong-hwa, Director of KIST, and Oh Sang-rok, project manager of the robot team at MIC, paid a visit to the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Born, Germany, during Deputy Prime Minister Kim Woo-shik's visit to Europe in the beginning of this month and signed and exchanged a letter of intent regarding investment for the joint development of robots with Sigmar Wittig, the head of DLR.
In this lab, there will be some researchers belonging to the Intelligent Robotics Research Center of KIST and around 5 researchers dispatched from DLR. By using DLR's robot arm technology and KIST's network robot technology, they will develop the nextgeneration citizens' robot model. MIC plans to adopt this model as the nextgeneration citizens' robot and commercialize the robot.
A source at MIC said, "If the results of the joint research are applied to the citizens' robot project, Germany will be able to check the possibility of the commercialization of robots by utilizing Korea s the test bed, and Korea will be able to receive the world's highest level robot technology. It will have win-win effects."
It is known that DLR's 'robot arm', recently developed by imitating the movements of human arms, is of the highest standard in the world.