Humanoid
Holiday Robotics has raised $105 million in Series A funding for its FRIDAY wheeled humanoid robot, designed to reduce the burden of repetitive physical work in industrial settings. The Seoul-based company emphasizes that for humanoids to be effective in manufacturing, they must reliably work alongside people and handle repetitive tasks, with safety and operational fit being critical.
The company notes that real factory environments impose constraints such as contact, timing, repeatability, safety, recovery, and operational fit that are absent in controlled demos. FRIDAY features a wheel-based mobile base, an upper body for dexterous manipulation, and hot-swappable batteries for full-shift operation. Safety is designed from the hardware up, with lightweight low-inertia hands, fully back-drivable joints, and 360° perception via multiple cameras and lidar sensors to eliminate blind spots.
Holiday says it sees safe operation around people as a requirement, not a feature.
Holiday Robotics asserts that value is created through the robot’s hands, which grasp parts, place components, adjust positions, sense contact, and recover from variations. The hands include tactile sensing and force-aware control, enabling the robot to feel contact and adapt to friction, weight, alignment, and surface changes. The company claims FRIDAY is built around high-dexterity robotic hands that handle the physical details making industrial work difficult to automate.
Source: The Robot Report