Acrylic Joins 65B KRW Physical AI Project with Rainbow Robotics

Recap

Source: 로봇신문, report of Sept. 22, 2026

According to the report, Acrylic, an AI infrastructure specialist, has joined a major national research and development initiative focused on physical AI. The project, titled 'Collaborative Intelligence Physical AI-based SW Platform R&D Ecosystem Creation,' is led by Sungkyunkwan University's Industry-Academia Cooperation Foundation and involves 18 academic, industrial, and research institutions, including KAIST, Seoul National University, Rainbow Robotics, and Hyundai Wia.

The total budget for the four-year and five-month project is approximately 65 billion KRW, with 450 billion KRW in government support. A key aspect of the report is that Acrylic's 'Jonathan PAI' platform is explicitly named in the project's official performance indicators. The research plan sets the number of robots that can be connected and controlled via Jonathan PAI as a primary success metric. Acrylic will handle the 'execution layer' development, including building a real-time robot communication gateway, standard interfaces for heterogeneous robots, and data collection pipelines.

The project aims to integrate and control at least seven different types of robots—such as industrial manipulators, autonomous mobile robots, and humanoids—through Jonathan PAI's standard interface by 2030. Acrylic plans to productize the results as a 'Robotics Edition' of its platform, a robot connector library, and a subscription-based licensing model. The company also announced it will hire five new researchers for robotics middleware and multimodal data platforms to support this work.

Context

This initiative is part of a broader push in South Korea to develop 'physical AI'—AI that interacts with the physical world through robotics. While many companies focus on building the 'brains' (foundation models) or the 'body' (hardware), Acrylic positions itself as the 'nervous system' or middleware that connects the two. The involvement of major players like Rainbow Robotics and Hyundai Wia suggests a strong industry-academia collaboration to create a unified standard for controlling diverse robotic systems, which is currently a fragmented field.

Robot's take

The significance of this project lies in its focus on interoperability. By making Jonathan PAI the official benchmark for connecting heterogeneous robots, Acrylic is attempting to create a de facto standard for physical AI execution. This could lower the barrier for deploying AI models across different robot types, which is a major pain point in the industry. However, the challenge will be in the real-world implementation, especially in complex environments like manufacturing and biotech, where reliability and safety are paramount. The success of this project will depend on how well the 'execution layer' can handle the latency and precision requirements of different robot classes.