Source: NC

NC AI, a company specializing in industry-specific artificial intelligence, has partnered with Hyundai Rotem, a leader in South Korea's defense and robotics sectors, to spearhead a national R&D project based on physical AI that is set to become a game changer for future defense infrastructure.

NC AI announced on the 28th that it has been selected as the final contractor for a national R&D project commissioned by the Agency for Defense Development (ADD) to develop a physical AI-based integrated simulator and modular robot system, in a consortium with Hyundai Rotem. This large-scale government project aims to maximize the efficiency of manned-unmanned teaming (MUM-T) weapon systems in future battlefield environments by organically controlling diverse unmanned robots and building digital twin-based simulators and modular robot hardware that minimize the gap between reality and virtual environments.

In this project, NC AI will lead the development of the 'World Model,' a core technology for implementing the next-generation robot foundation model, which serves as the brain of the robot. The World Model is a cutting-edge physical AI technology that allows robots to simulate various environments by reflecting real-world physical laws and environmental changes, and to use these simulations as training data.

This is considered the only key to solving the 'sim-to-real' gap—the problem where unmanned robots trained in virtual environments malfunction due to physical variables when deployed in the real world, such as on rugged battlefields. NC AI plans to build a pipeline that efficiently supplies high-quality synthetic data to respond to complex changes in defense terrain by organically integrating its long-accumulated know-how in building large-scale, high-precision 3D virtual worlds with its proprietary 3D generative AI technology.

The selection for this national project is seen as national recognition of the R&D achievements NC AI has independently attained in the fields of physical AI and World Models, areas previously dominated by global big tech companies.

Previously, in March, NC AI successfully unveiled an ultra-efficient World Foundation Model technology that achieves performance comparable to the world's top-performing models while using only 25 percent of the GPU resources. While existing big tech World Models use a complex method of generating large-scale video first and then inferring it through a vision-language model, NC AI introduced an innovative architecture that derives robot actions directly from latent space information, the stage just before video generation. Through this, it secured a success rate on par with 'Cosmos,' the top-tier robot AI model from global tech giant NVIDIA, proving its practical applicability.

With the win of this national project, NC AI has further solidified its position as an industry-specific AI specialist that goes beyond general-purpose AI to solve complex challenges in specific sectors. Amidst heightened security crises exacerbated by declining military populations and personnel shortages, NC AI aims to prevent dependence on foreign technology and secure national sovereignty in physical AI by directly transplanting its ultra-efficient, lightweight World Model technology into military weapon systems and virtual simulators.

Lee Yeon-soo, CEO of NC AI, expressed his ambition, stating, It is deeply meaningful to participate in a national project that will be responsible for the country's future security alongside Hyundai Rotem, a symbol of South Korea's defense industry. Based on our unrivaled lightweight World Model, we will develop the best physical AI simulator that perfectly connects the virtual and the real, taking the lead in accelerating the AI transformation of South Korea's national defense.