Korea East-West Power accelerates smart plant transition with AI robot MOU

Korea East-West Power Co. (president Kwon Myeong-ho) signed a memorandum of understanding with LOAS Co. at the company's office in Songpa-gu, Seoul, on Friday to develop and pilot physical AI technology based on a domestically developed robot platform, as part of its push to accelerate the transition to smart power plants.

Under the agreement, the two organizations will verify the potential of physical AI in complex power plant environments. Pilot sites include the pulverizer room at the Dangjin Power Plant headquarters — where equipment start-stop cycles and breakdowns have increased due to growing grid volatility — and an indoor coal storage facility that poses a high risk of spontaneous combustion and requires regular equipment inspection and safety assessment.

Wheeled and tracked AI robots equipped with multi-sensor arrays — including acoustic, visual and thermal imaging — will carry out equipment fault diagnosis, instrument inspection, and fire and industrial safety monitoring for up to six consecutive hours. Data collected through the company's internal secure wireless network will be transmitted in real time for use in power plant surveillance.

Korea East-West Power will provide access to an actual plant environment to verify the on-site utility and operational efficiency of the physical AI robots, while LOAS will use the pilot data gathered to improve the performance of its industrial inspection robots and advance the underlying technology.

The pilot will also validate LOAS's proprietary integrated control platform, ARQOS, alongside the robots, and is expected to strengthen the competitiveness of South Korea's physical AI industry.

Building on the pilot results, Korea East-West Power plans to complete an effectiveness evaluation by the second half of this year and establish a physical AI surveillance system for power plant equipment — one that integrates device control and three-dimensional spatial mapping technology into a technical specification reflecting the robots' essential requirements and operational standards.