Singapore Opens Humanoid Training Centre, Targets Public-Safety Deployment by 2028

Singapore’s Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) has opened a dedicated humanoid robotics centre, targeting a first robot working alongside officers in a real operational setting by 2028. The Home Team Humanoid Robotics Centre, or H2RC, launched on September 30 to develop capabilities for public-safety missions.

Key Takeaways

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• H2RC is training humanoids for hazardous-material work, ambulance resupply, post-blast investigation and prison-cell searches.
• The 29,000-square-foot facility combines realistic mock-ups with data collection, model training and evaluation.
• Operational use remains a target: HTX plans trials, validation, cybersecurity checks and reliability testing before deployment.

According to HTX’s launch announcement, the centre demonstrated four applications still in development. These cover hazardous-material containment, mitigation and sampling, plus ambulance restocking for the Singapore Civil Defence Force; post-blast investigation for the Singapore Police Force; and contraband searches for the Singapore Prison Service.

Training for public-safety conditions

H2RC includes simulated debris fields and industrial pipes and valves. An overhead support system allows engineers to test humanoid movement while reducing the risk of damage during development.

The agency’s media release identifies task-specific data as a central challenge. Public-safety training data must be collected and annotated, then used to develop vision-language-action models whose performance can be checked in realistic settings.

The facility supports motion capture, teleoperation, human demonstrations and simulation, alongside work on AI systems that execute multi-step missions. HTX’s Robotics, Automation and Unmanned Systems engineering team runs the centre.

Partners and a 2028 target

HTX signed an agreement with ST Engineering at the launch covering joint research, platform integration and cybersecurity. Its announcement also names Mistral AI, Field AI and General Robotics as partners developing humanoid capabilities for Home Team applications.

Training will draw on HTX’s NGINE sovereign AI infrastructure, upgraded with Singtel RE:AI to include NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB300 GPUs.

The 2028 goal concerns a first humanoid performing defined tasks alongside officers, rather than a broad fleet rollout. HTX says development will proceed through capability building, trials and validation before operational deployment.

The centre gives public-safety agencies a place to test whether humanoids can turn a sequence of individual skills—opening a door, moving through debris, handling a tool—into a dependable mission. That transition from demonstrations to repeatable work will determine how useful the programme becomes.