Rainbow Robotics — Korea's HUBO heritage, now a Samsung-backed humanoid platform
Rainbow Robotics is a Daejeon-headquartered, KOSDAQ-listed robotics company spun out of the KAIST HUBO Lab — the group that built Korea's first bipedal humanoid in 2004 and won the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge. Today it ships the HUBO series of biped research humanoids, the RB-Y1 bimanual mobile manipulator, and the RB series of collaborative arms — all under the strategic ownership of Samsung Electronics, which took a 35 percent controlling stake at the end of 2024 as part of a broader push into the current humanoid robotics and general-purpose robot AI boom.
- 2011Founded
- Daejeon, KRHeadquarters
- RB-Y1Latest flagship (2024)
- KOSDAQ: 277810Listing
- South KoreaCountry
- Samsung 35%Largest shareholder
About Rainbow Robotics
Rainbow Robotics Co., Ltd. was founded on February 10, 2011 by Professor Oh Jun-ho — widely known as the "father of HUBO" — together with researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology's (KAIST) Humanoid Robot Research Center. Originally incorporated simply as "Rainbow", the company was created to commercialise and industrialise more than a decade of academic work on bipedal humanoids, starting with the KHR series in the early 2000s and culminating in HUBO — Korea's first full-size bipedal walking robot — in 2004.
The company's early years were spent building and exporting research platforms. By 2012 Rainbow had produced 15 units of HUBO-2 Plus, shipping four to Korean humanoid research teams and eleven to labs in the United States, Japan, Singapore, and China. The defining public moment came in June 2015, when DRC-HUBO, a transformable bipedal robot developed at KAIST with Rainbow, won the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals in Pomona, California — a US$2 million disaster-response competition — beating teams from Boston Dynamics, IHMC, Carnegie Mellon, and NASA. That win established Rainbow's global reputation and validated the KAIST bipedal-walking stack as state-of-the-art.
Rainbow diversified from pure humanoids into industrial automation over the following decade, launching its RB series of six-axis collaborative arms (initially the RB5-850, RB3-1200, and RB10-1300, later joined by the RB6-1700 and RB16-900) as well as astronomical mounts, robot controllers, and delta-style parallel robots. The company went public on KOSDAQ under ticker 277810 on February 3, 2021, raising approximately KRW 26.5 billion. In March 2024 it unveiled the RB-Y1 bimanual mobile manipulator, positioning it as "the world's first research platform for AI experts" and pricing the research configuration at approximately USD 80,000.
The most consequential recent event, however, is the arrival of Samsung Electronics as a controlling shareholder. Samsung first acquired a 14.7 percent stake in early 2023 for KRW 86.8 billion. On December 31, 2024 Samsung exercised a call option to lift its holding to 35.0 percent, paying an additional KRW 267 billion (roughly USD 181 million) and consolidating Rainbow into its financial statements as a subsidiary. Professor Oh — after retiring from Rainbow — joined Samsung as head of a newly formed Future Robotics Office. The strategic thesis is clear: Samsung wants a domestic answer to Hyundai's ownership of Boston Dynamics, and a credible hardware foundation for future consumer and industrial humanoid products. Rainbow's direct competitors in Korea and adjacent markets now include Doosan Robotics, HD Hyundai Robotics, Hanwha Robotics, and — in the humanoid category — Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, 1X, Apptronik, Agility Robotics, and Tesla Optimus.
Product lineup: HUBO, RB-Y1, and RB cobots
Rainbow's portfolio spans three product families: research-grade bipedal humanoids in the HUBO lineage, the RB-Y1 bimanual mobile manipulator aimed at foundation-model and manipulation research, and the industrial RB series of collaborative arms. Together they cover almost the full stack of modern service and industrial robotics.
HUBO-2 Plus (2011) — the KAIST research biped
HUBO-2 Plus was the first production model out of Rainbow, a compact biped standing approximately 130 cm tall and weighing 43 kg, with 38 degrees of freedom driven by harmonic-geared brushless DC motors. It shipped in small quantities to research groups worldwide and remains a reference platform for whole-body control and bipedal-locomotion research.
DRC-HUBO+ (2015) — the DARPA Robotics Challenge winner
DRC-HUBO+ was the transformable version of HUBO built specifically for the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals. At roughly 170 cm and 80 kg it could switch between bipedal walking and a wheeled kneeling mode, allowing it to traverse rubble and enter vehicles. Its June 2015 victory established Rainbow as one of the few teams anywhere with a proven full-stack humanoid capable of unstructured task execution.
RB series (2018–present) — the collaborative arms
The RB series is Rainbow's industrial workhorse: six-axis collaborative robot arms offered in payloads from 3 kg (RB3-1200, 1,200 mm reach) through 5 kg (RB5-850, ~928 mm reach), 6 kg (RB6-1700, 1,700 mm reach), 10 kg (RB10-1300, 1,300 mm reach), and 16 kg (RB16-900, 900 mm reach). Repeatability is ±0.05 mm, all models use an M10 12-pin tool connector, and enclosures are rated to IP66 for use in food, manufacturing, and packaging environments.
RB-Y1 (2024) — the bimanual mobile manipulator flagship
The RB-Y1 is Rainbow's clearest bet on the current humanoid and foundation-model wave. It is a wheeled bimanual mobile manipulator: two arms with 7 degrees of freedom each, a 6-DoF lifting torso that raises and lowers the upper body, and a wheeled base with an omnidirectional Mecanum option — 24 controllable joints in total, 140 cm tall, 131 kg, 3 kg payload per arm, sub-0.1 mm arm repeatability, and up to 1.5 m/s base speed. The onboard AI stack runs on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin 64 GB, and the platform ships from approximately USD 80,000 in its research configuration.
| Model | Year | Height | Weight | Payload | Battery/Runtime | Actuators | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HUBO-2 Plus | 2011 | ~1.30 m | ~43 kg | ~2 kg/arm | ~130 min | 38× BLDC + harmonic | KAIST research biped; 15 units exported |
| DRC-HUBO+ | 2015 | ~1.70 m | ~80 kg | — | Internal pack | BLDC + harmonic | Won 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge |
| RB5-850 | 2018 | — | 22 kg | 5 kg | External DC | 6× brushless joint | General-purpose cobot; IP66 |
| RB10-1300 | 2019 | — | 37.1 kg | 10 kg | External DC | 6× brushless joint | Palletising, packaging, courier |
| RB16-900 | ~2022 | — | ~39 kg | 16 kg | External DC | 6× brushless joint | Heaviest RB cobot; 900 mm reach |
| RB-Y1 | 2024 | ~1.40 m | 131 kg | 3 kg/arm | ~3 h (1,270 Wh) | 24× BLDC + harmonic | Bimanual mobile manipulator; Jetson AGX Orin; from ~$80K |
Technology stack
Rainbow's technical identity is unusually well-defined for a robotics company its size: two decades of KAIST HUBO Lab research on bipedal walking, whole-body control, and harmonic-geared BLDC actuators, combined with an in-house RB control platform that scales from six-axis industrial arms to 24-DoF bimanual mobile manipulators. Unlike newer humanoid startups that outsource key subsystems, Rainbow builds most of its own actuators, joint controllers, and motion control software.
Perception
The RB-Y1 ships with a multi-camera vision system, joint-level force/torque sensing, and proprioceptive position and torque estimation on every joint. LiDAR and optional high-performance 3D recognition sensors extend the base platform for autonomous navigation, and the RB-Y1 also supports teleoperation via a matching master-arm rig, a joystick, or VR controllers — allowing AI teams to collect high-quality demonstration data for imitation learning and vision-language-action models.
AI and control
Onboard AI compute on RB-Y1 is anchored by an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin 64 GB module running Linux with ROS/ROS2 compatibility, exposed to developers through a published SDK. The platform is deliberately open at the software layer so that university, national-lab, and corporate research teams can drop in their own manipulation policies, VLA models, or diffusion-based controllers. On the industrial side, the RB cobot line runs Rainbow's proprietary RB GUI — an icon-based, low-code interface that lets factory engineers configure pick-and-place, assembly, and palletising cells without traditional robot programming.
Actuators, power, and compute
Every Rainbow platform is fully electric: brushless DC motors with harmonic-drive reducers throughout the arms and joints, no hydraulics anywhere in the product line. The RB-Y1 carries a roughly 50 V / 25 Ah (1,270 Wh) lithium-ion battery pack for about three hours of continuous operation, while RB cobots run on external DC supplies rated between 200 W (RB5-850) and 350 W (RB10-1300). Interfaces are standard industrial fare — Ethernet, RS-232/422/485, TCP/IP, Modbus TCP — with an M10 12-pin tool connector at each cobot flange.
The electronic bill of materials that makes all of this work sits deep inside the current component-shortage envelope. Every joint's servo controller must deliver hundreds of watts of instantaneous torque without thermally throttling, which drives the use of high-efficiency wide-bandgap semiconductors (SiC and GaN) in the motor-driver stages and requires tightly matched precision passives on every gate-drive and current-sense channel. The onboard battery pack integrates cell balancing, thermal management, and multi-stage battery-management ICs, and every Jetson carrier board depends on hundreds of MLCC decoupling capacitors and precision resistors to keep high-speed DDR, PCIe, and PMIC rails stable. These are exactly the part families most exposed to allocation, EOL notices, and long lead times in the current AI boom.
Applications and deployments
Rainbow addresses three distinct customer bases in parallel: industrial automation integrators buying RB cobots, AI and manipulation research groups buying RB-Y1, and Samsung Electronics itself, which now uses Rainbow as its strategic humanoid hardware arm. Publicly disclosed deployments and target markets include:
- Industrial automation (RB cobots). Deployed globally via distributors in manufacturing, assembly, component fastening, packaging, palletising, courier logistics, and food handling — the RB-N series carries NSF food-safe certification. Common integrators include automotive tier-1 suppliers and Korean conglomerate factories.
- AI and manipulation research (RB-Y1). Pre-orders opened in 2024 at approximately USD 80,000, targeted at university labs, corporate research groups, and foundation-model developers building vision-language-action stacks — a group that includes many of the same teams driving the current humanoid robotics and AI boom.
- Samsung strategic partnership. Following the December 2024 stake increase, Samsung Electronics established a Future Robotics Office headed by Rainbow founder Oh Jun-ho, with public statements positioning Rainbow as Samsung's hardware platform for future consumer, service, and industrial robotics products.
- Research humanoids (HUBO lineage). HUBO-class biped platforms have shipped to research groups in the United States, Japan, Singapore, and China, and remain in use as reference platforms for whole-body control and legged-locomotion research.
- Education and training. Rainbow explicitly markets the RB series as an education platform, with dedicated curricula for technical high schools, community colleges, and university-level robotics programs.
The robotics supply chain — where Hybrid Electronics fits in
A modern humanoid robot is one of the most component-dense products ever built. A single Rainbow-class platform — whether an RB-Y1 bimanual mobile manipulator, a DRC-HUBO-style biped, or a fleet of RB cobots on a production line — depends on thousands of individual electronic components: precision BLDC motor drivers, high-torque servo modules, IMUs and 6-DoF force-torque sensors, LiDAR and time-of-flight modules, GPU compute boards such as NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin carriers, battery-management ICs, wide-bandgap SiC/GaN power semiconductors, high-speed board-to-board connectors, precision resistors, and thousands of MLCC capacitors distributed across every power and signal rail.
Building that kind of hardware puts enormous pressure on the electronic-components supply chain. Prototype pilots and low-volume production runs frequently hit allocation, EOL notices, and long lead times on the exact parts they need, and R&D and field-service teams routinely have to support older platforms that use semiconductors no longer in mainstream distribution. During the current humanoid robotics and general-purpose robot AI boom, this pressure is amplified: dozens of well-funded teams — Samsung/Rainbow among them, alongside Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, 1X, Apptronik, Agility, Doosan, HD Hyundai, and Tesla — are chasing the same short list of high-torque BLDC drivers, precision IMUs, GPU compute modules, and automotive-grade power semiconductors. Franchise stock on many key parts is now measured in months of lead time rather than weeks.
Hybrid Electronics has been sourcing electronic components for industrial and embedded systems since 1995. For robotics teams — humanoid, mobile, industrial, and research — we specialize in finding the parts you need when mainstream distribution can't:
Obsolete and end-of-life parts
Legacy semiconductors, sensors, connectors, and passives that are no longer in mainstream distribution — the parts that keep older platforms running during transitions to newer hardware, and the long-tail items that block a BOM from closing.
Allocated and hard-to-find active parts
High-torque BLDC motor drivers, IMUs and MEMS sensors, SiC/GaN power devices, GPU compute modules, precision resistors, and MLCC capacitors caught in allocation or long-lead times. Send us a BOM or a shortage list — we'll confirm what we can source and at what lead time.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Rainbow Robotics?
Rainbow Robotics was founded on February 10, 2011 by Professor Oh Jun-ho of KAIST — the lead researcher behind Korea's HUBO bipedal humanoid — together with colleagues from the KAIST Humanoid Robot Research Center. The company is headquartered in Daejeon, South Korea, and has been listed on KOSDAQ since February 2021 under ticker 277810.
What is the RB-Y1?
RB-Y1 is Rainbow Robotics' 2024 bimanual mobile manipulator, marketed as the world's first research platform built for AI experts. It combines two 7-DoF arms with a 6-DoF lifting torso and a wheeled mobile base, totalling 24 degrees of freedom. It stands ~140 cm tall, weighs 131 kg, offers 3 kg payload per arm, and lists from approximately USD 80,000 in its research configuration.
Where are Rainbow Robotics robots deployed commercially?
Rainbow's RB series collaborative arms (RB3-1200, RB5-850, RB10-1300, RB16-900, and others) are deployed globally through distributors and integrators in manufacturing, assembly, packaging, palletising, and education. HUBO-class humanoids have shipped to research groups in the US, Japan, Singapore, and China. The RB-Y1 is targeted at AI and manipulation researchers, with Samsung Electronics — Rainbow's largest shareholder — publicly linking the partnership to future consumer and industrial robotics products.
Is Rainbow Robotics publicly traded, and what is Samsung's stake?
Yes. Rainbow Robotics has been listed on KOSDAQ under ticker 277810 since February 3, 2021. Samsung Electronics first acquired a 14.7 percent stake in 2023 for approximately KRW 86.8 billion, then exercised a call option on December 31, 2024 to raise its holding to 35.0 percent for a further KRW 267 billion (approximately USD 181 million), becoming the largest shareholder and consolidating Rainbow as a subsidiary in Samsung's financial statements.
Is Hybrid Electronics affiliated with Rainbow Robotics?
No. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company. We are not a distributor, reseller, or partner of Rainbow Robotics. All trademarks are property of their respective owners. Hybrid supports robotics developers by sourcing obsolete, allocated, and hard-to-find semiconductors, sensors, connectors, and passives for R&D, prototype, and low-volume production builds.
Can Hybrid help with components for humanoid robotics builds?
Yes. We regularly support R&D and integrator teams with hard-to-find semiconductors, BLDC motor-driver ICs, IMUs and other MEMS sensors, connectors, SiC/GaN power devices, and precision passives for the industrial and embedded boards used in robotics platforms. Send us a BOM or a short list of shortages and we'll confirm availability and pricing.
Trademark and affiliation notice. Rainbow Robotics®, HUBO, DRC-HUBO, RB-Y1, and the RB series names are trademarks of Rainbow Robotics Co., Ltd. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Rainbow Robotics Co., Ltd. or Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.