Friday

Friday is a cutting-edge dexterous humanoid robot developed by Holiday Robotics, a South Korean startup founded in April 2024 by serial entrepreneur Song Ki-young, previously of AI vision firm SuaLab (acquired by Cognex). Launched in late October 2025, Friday prioritizes superior manipulation capabilities over bipedal locomotion, featuring a stable wheeled mobile base paired with highly advanced 20-DoF tactile hands. Standing at 176 cm tall and weighing 115 kg (with a heavy 66 kg base for low center-of-gravity stability), the robot achieves a top speed of 1.9 m/s (6.84 km/h) and supports continuous 24/7 operation via hot-swappable batteries providing up to 4 hours runtime per charge. Architecturally, Friday boasts 63 degrees of freedom overall: 7-DoF arms (lightest claimed at 5 kg each), a 5-DoF torso enabling ground-level reach, and dual 20-DoF hands weighing just 500 g each. The hands integrate full-palm tactile sensors using cost-effective magnetic designs (~$21 per sensor), detecting forces as low as 0.05 N at a 1900 Hz refresh rate. This enables compliant, precise grasping of delicate or irregular objects, with payloads up to 5 kg per arm (20 kg proximal). Propulsion relies on BLDC motors with quasi-direct drive (QDD) gearing for back-drivability across all joints, housed in an aluminum frame. Onboard computing is powered by NVIDIA Jetson Orin, running Linux with Wi-Fi connectivity, low 0.2 s latency from perception to action, and no ingress protection rating. AI integration centers on a Vision-Language-Skill (VLS) framework, a 'whitebox' system selecting from pre-verified skills (e.g., grasping, pushing, inserting) for industrial safety, avoiding opaque Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. Skills are trained in Holiday Robotics' proprietary 'Holiday Sim' simulator, which accurately models soft-body contacts, deformation, compliance, friction, and sim-to-real gaps. The stack supports autonomous operation, teleop fallback, sensor fusion for navigation/obstacle avoidance, and human-safe interaction via compliant joints and force sensing. No native LLM integration is present. As a prototype targeted at manufacturing, logistics, and research, Friday has no widespread deployments yet but is positioned for real-world pilots. Holiday Robotics plans initial production of 100 units in 2026 at ~100 million KRW (~$70,000 USD), targeting automotive and electronics manufacturers for ROI parity with human labor. Future roadmap includes bipedal variants (testing December 2025), 'Saturday' for service (e.g., restaurants), and 'Sunday' for homes. Early demos showcase bin-picking, tool use, assembly, and dynamic tasks like simulated snowboarding, emphasizing dexterity in unstructured environments. With South Korea's robotics ecosystem (Samsung, LG, K-Humanoid Alliance), Friday aims to bridge lab prototypes to commercial viability.