KORTHOS / ECOSYSTEM / PRODUCT

Ambidex

About

About Ambidex

Ambidex uses remote cable-driven actuation to keep motor mass away from its arms, producing lightweight links with low inertia around people and objects. Two articulated arms provide human-scale reach and can regulate contact force during coordinated manipulation. The mechanism combines strength with mechanical compliance for tasks involving delicate, deformable or uncertain objects.

NAVER LABS developed the platform with KOREATECH to study how robots can learn force, timing and control from human demonstrations. Research methods include teleoperation, reinforcement learning and transfer of human manipulation skills into two-arm tasks. Ambidex remains a research platform supporting NAVER LABS’ work on service robotics and physical interaction.

Capabilities

Source-backed capabilities

  • Control modes: Bilateral Haptic Teleoperation
  • Remote and shared control

    Research demonstration - 2020-11-11 - Control AMBIDEX through a bilateral haptic device that returns interaction forces to the operator.

    Source

Research

  • Robust and Expressive Humanoid Motion Retargeting via Optimization-Based Rig Unification

    2025-10-19 - Research Publication - An optimization pipeline retargets diverse motion sources to multiple robot morphologies and validates the resulting motions on real AMBIDEX hardware.

    Source
  • AMBIDEX Task Learning Project and AROUND D at the 2020 Global Forum

    2020-11-11 - Research Publication - NAVER reports an AMBIDEX task-learning system using bilateral haptic demonstrations and force-control data as learning references. The upgraded robot adds a waist, perception head and BLT gripper; the same report introduces the AROUND D delivery research platform.

    Source
  • A Hybrid Dynamic Model for the AMBIDEX Tendon-Driven Manipulator

    Research Publication - A physics-and-learning hybrid model addresses friction, tendon deformation and joint-state estimation on the seven-degree-of-freedom AMBIDEX arm.

    Source

Context

Market context

Ambidex is NAVER LABS' lightweight cable-driven dual-arm robot designed for safe, human-like manipulation and haptic control in research environments.

  • Target environment: Research labs, robotics development facilities and human-robot interaction research spaces.
  • Workflow context: Dual-arm manipulation, haptic interaction, teleoperation and embodied AI research using cable-driven actuation for safe physical interaction.
  • Customer context: Robotics researchers, manipulation labs and AI teams studying safe physical human-robot interaction.
  • Deployment model: Research platform available through NAVER LABS product channels.
  • Commercial maturity: Active research platform with strong academic and industry research adoption.
  • Adoption constraints: Cable-driven design prioritizes safety and compliance over payload and speed. Best suited to research rather than production environments.
  • Market position: A manipulation-first research platform focused on safe physical interaction. Sits in the mobile manipulation research space alongside other dual-arm platforms.
  • Adjacent products: Astribot S1, AgiBot G2, cable-driven manipulation platforms

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