Insider Brief
- Singapore’s Home Team Science and Technology Agency opened the 29,000-square-foot Home Team Humanoid Robotics Centre to develop embodied AI systems for public safety, with the first humanoid robot targeted for operational use by 2028.
- The center will train and test humanoids for tasks including hazardous-material handling, post-blast investigations, prison-cell searches and ambulance supply restocking while supporting motion capture, teleoperation, simulation and vision-language-action model development.
- H2RC will also serve as a collaboration platform, with HTX partnering with ST Engineering on robotics, integration and cybersecurity and with Singtel RE:AI to expand sovereign AI infrastructure using Nvidia Grace Blackwell GB300 GPUs.
Singapore’s Home Team Science and Technology Agency, or HTX, has opened a new humanoid robotics center focused on developing embodied AI systems for public safety, with plans to put its first humanoid robot into service by 2028.
The Home Team is Singapore’s network of public safety and security agencies and HTX said the the Home Team Humanoid Robotics Centre, or H2RC, will train and test robots for agencies across the system, including police, civil defense, immigration and prison services. According to the agency, the center will also serve as a collaboration platform for Home Team departments, companies, universities and research institutes.
The 29,000-square-foot center will focus on embodied AI, or systems that allow robots to perceive, reason and act in physical environments. HTX indicated it chose humanoids because their human-like form allows them to work in spaces and use tools already designed for people. The agency said most commercial humanoid development has focused on manufacturing, household and consumer uses, leaving public-safety applications less developed.
Potential applications under consideration include:
- Handling hazardous materials
- Investigating post-blast scenes
- Searching prison cells for contraband
- Restocking ambulance emergency medical supplies
Edwin Tong, Singapore’s Minister for Law and Second Minister for Home Affairs, said at the opening that H2RC is the first center of its kind dedicated specifically to humanoid robotics for public safety. He noted the Home Team sees the technology as a way to augment officers rather than replace them, particularly as Singapore faces manpower constraints and operates in dense urban environments.
“The robot takes on the routine, physically demanding, or the dangerous work,” Tong said. “Our officers focus on the work that calls for empathy, for judgement, and for leadership — the human instincts behind the job that the Home Team officers do — and that can be the province of our officers.”
Training Robots for Public Safety
Development will proceed through capability building, trials and validation, with cybersecurity and reliability testing required before operational deployment. Tong said robots trained for factory floors would not automatically know how to operate safely at emergency scenes, making Home Team-specific data a central part of the program.
H2RC will support the full embodied-AI development cycle, including motion capture, teleoperation, human demonstrations and simulation for generating training data. The center will also train and evaluate vision-language-action models, which connect what a robot sees and understands with the physical actions it takes.
HTX pointed out that public-safety robots require specialized data that cannot simply be purchased or borrowed from industrial applications. H2RC will use realistic mock-ups and operational scenarios to capture, review and label that data before models are tested in representative environments.
HTX and ST Engineering signed a memorandum of understanding at the opening covering joint research and development, technology and platform integration, industry and academic partnerships, and cybersecurity. HTX is also working with Singtel RE:AI to upgrade its NGINE sovereign AI infrastructure with Nvidia Grace Blackwell GB300 GPUs. The computing system will support embodied AI and multimodal model training for H2RC and other Home Team applications.
