Krafton unveils Ludi 0.2, AI designed to help robots work with humans

Krafton, the Korean video game publisher behind the global hit PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS, is taking its artificial intelligence (AI) research beyond virtual worlds, unveiling a new robotics system designed to help machines understand human intentions, respond to social cues and work alongside people.

Ludo Robotics, Krafton’s robotics research subsidiary, introduced Ludi 0.2 on Friday at the 2026 Bay Area Robotics Symposium, held at the University of California, Berkeley.

The presentation was led by Lee Kang-wook, Krafton’s chief AI officer and chief technology officer of Ludo Robotics.

The new system builds on Ludi 0.1, introduced in August, with improvements aimed at making robots more responsive to changing situations and more capable of interacting naturally with humans.

Ludo Robotics focuses on what it calls social intelligence: the ability of robots to understand people’s intentions, adapt to changing environments and cooperate naturally.

Ludi 0.2 enhances several capabilities, including recognizing human gestures and feedback, maintaining context during changing tasks, connecting movement with object manipulation and responding with smoother physical actions.

Its predecessor, Ludi 0.1, combined a vision-language model responsible for conversation and reasoning with capabilities for navigation and object manipulation.

The system can understand spoken instructions, maintain conversational context and ask follow-up questions when commands are unclear.

For example, a robot carrying a requested drink can stop and switch to another beverage when a person changes the instruction mid-task.

Ludo Robotics is also developing Ludi 1.0, a next-generation foundation model intended to integrate environmental perception, conversation and physical actions into a single system.

The goal is to enable robots to communicate with people in real time while sharing an understanding of assigned tasks.

“Drawing on this experience, we will develop AI for robots that can communicate and cooperate naturally with people in the real world,” Krafton and Ludo Robotics CEO Kim Chang-han said.

Krafton also announced that Ludo Robotics has officially opened its headquarters research center in Palo Alto, California, which will work alongside its Seoul office to advance AI and robotics research.

This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.