Daedong Corporation

Daedong Corporation is a South Korean agricultural machinery manufacturer headquartered in Dalseong-gun, Daegu, with a second campus in Seocho-gu, Seoul. It began in 1947 as a machinery shop and in 1949 produced what it describes as Korea's first domestically made engine. Today it sells tractors, combine harvesters, rice transplanters, agricultural drones, utility vehicles, power tillers, skid loaders and diesel engines. Outside Korea it trades mainly under the Kioti brand, through Kioti units in North America and Europe. Daedong says it is South Korea's number one agricultural machinery exporter, shipping to more than 70 countries, and press reports say North America accounts for over 70 percent of annual revenue. Daedong Corporation is listed on the Korea Exchange under code 000490 and is run by co-CEOs Kim Joon-shik and Won Yoo-hyun.

Daedong's robotics work grows out of its tractor automation. In 2021 it launched the HX series, a remote-controlled and autonomous tractor that the company markets as Korea's first AI tractor. At CES 2025 it showed the RX series utility tractor, which drives and performs field work on its own using on-device AI. The company said Kioti tractors reach level-4.5 autonomy under a 2022 Korean automated-farming standard. Self-driving Kioti tractors were then sold only in Korea, with export planned, and some North American models use vision sensors to map field boundaries and recognise attachments. Daedong also released Korea's first self-driving combine harvester and runs the Daedong Connect telematics app, through which tractors can be monitored and operated remotely.

Its first dedicated field robot is the Kioti RT100 (listed on the Korean site as RT100-TS), an electric autonomous transport robot whose name stands for robot transport, first generation. According to Future Farming, it carries 300 kg payloads such as spray tanks or fruit boxes. It has three operating modes: RTK-GPS autonomous navigation, following a worker who wears a special vest, and following a person on a wired leash. It uses LiDAR and several 3D cameras, skid steering and 4WD, measures 1.65 x 1.23 x 1.15 m, weighs 380 kg empty, climbs 30 percent slopes and reaches 6 km/h. Battery packs give 4 to 8 hours of operation and are swapped when depleted. Kioti targeted commercial introduction in 2026.

Daedong set up a dedicated subsidiary, Daedong Robotics, with the Korea Institute of Robotics and Technology Convergence (KIRO). Its first CEO is Gam Byeong-woo, previously Daedong's head of product planning. The unit covers agricultural and industrial service robots, personal mobility and transport robots, and special-task robots such as cleaning and snow-removal machines, and it plans a multipurpose farm robot with swappable modules for transport, pest control, harvesting, weeding and spraying. In August 2026 Daedong announced joint development with Rainbow Robotics of AGROID, an agricultural humanoid that pairs Rainbow Robotics' humanoid upper body and harvesting arm with a Daedong wheeled lower platform. Daedong Robotics and Daedong AgTech supply navigation, path generation and crop-recognition AI. The first prototype was being field-tested on tomato harvesting, and AGROID is meant to work in a fourth-generation AI greenhouse in Jeollanam-do by 2028 under the National Agricultural AX Platform project, for which a Daedong-led consortium was selected. Daedong also leads the unmanned agricultural robot part of Korea's K-On-Device AI Semiconductor program. That program has KRW 43.1 billion in funding through 2030 and 14 participants, including Mobilint, Rainbow Robotics and Seoul National University, with prototypes due in 2028.