Hyundai Engineering Co., Ltd.

Hyundai Engineering Co., Ltd. (HEC) is a Seoul-based engineering, procurement and construction company founded in 1974 and part of Hyundai Motor Group since April 2011. It works in plants (oil, gas, petrochemical, power and LNG), architecture and housing under the Hillstate brand, infrastructure and asset management, and reported about 6,478 employees and KRW 7.36 trillion in revenue for 2021. Its largest shareholder is Hyundai Engineering & Construction (about 38.6%), followed by Hyundai Motor Group chairman Chung Eui-sun, Hyundai Glovis, Kia and Hyundai Mobis. A planned listing on the Korea Exchange was withdrawn in January 2022, so the company remains unlisted.

HEC appears in RobotToday's construction landscape as a contractor that develops robots for its own sites rather than buying them off the shelf. In a 2020 smart-construction roadmap it set out work on robotic 3D printing for non-standard buildings, unmanned plastering, masonry automation, autonomous floor-flatness inspection and site-management robots.

The most mature result is its exterior wall painting robot, developed since 2020 with painting contractor J2ENC. It replaces gondola-based facade painting with an unmanned unit that is operated remotely from the ground or the roof and sprays continuously from top to bottom through multiple nozzles. Two sub-fans counter wind, horizontal auto-correction sensors keep it level, it stops automatically by altitude, and an anti-scatter casing with dust-collection filters is used together with a dedicated solvent-free, low-overspray paint that cuts overspray by more than 90% versus conventional water-based paint. Field trials showed about twice the speed of manual painting. The robot was invited to an LH (Korea Land and Housing Corporation) construction-automation robot demonstration in 2023, won an innovation award at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport's Smart Construction Challenge in 2024, and in February 2026 was designated Construction New Technology No. 1042. HEC plans to extend it to more facade types and taller buildings.

HEC's AI plastering robot, co-developed with Korean robotics start-up Robo Block Systems, measures freshly poured concrete slabs with a 3D scanner and then levels areas that fall outside the flatness tolerance using two motors, each carrying four trowel blades. It targets floors where flatness matters, such as smart factories and large logistics warehouses, and was exhibited in the Korean robot pavilion at Automatica 2023 in Munich. When first announced in 2020 the machine was a prototype for which patents were being sought.

For non-standard architecture, HEC worked with Sampyo and start-up BAT from 2018 on a method combining ultra-high-performance concrete, metal 3D printing of rebar in the shapes a curved structure requires, and a six-axis articulated robot that mills EPS foam into formwork. A curved mock-up verified by 3D scanning was built within about +/-2.5 mm, and patents were filed in 2020.

Note that HEC is a separate company from its parent Hyundai E&C, which runs its own robotics lab in Yongin; robots announced by Hyundai E&C should not be attributed to HEC.