Singapore Opens Center to Train Humanoid Robots for Police & Public Safety Roles

Singapore's Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) has opened the Home Team Humanoid Robotics Centre (H2RC), focused on developing embodied AI systems for public safety, and plans to put its first humanoid robot into service before 2028. The center covers 29,000 square feet and will train and test robots, serving agencies across Singapore's Home Team system including the police, civil defence, immigration and prisons.

This positioning sets H2RC apart from most commercial humanoid robot development. HTX says most commercial humanoid robot development is concentrated in manufacturing, household and consumer uses, with less development for public safety applications. Singapore's Minister for Law and Second Minister for Home Affairs Edwin Tong said at the opening ceremony that H2RC is the first such center dedicated to public safety humanoid robots — this "first" statement is the minister's own claim and has not been verified by a third party.

HTX says it chose the humanoid form because its human-like shape allows it to use existing tools in workspaces already designed for people. This rationale points to a real constraint: the robot needs to operate without modifying existing workspaces and tools.

Application scenarios HTX is considering include handling hazardous materials, investigating post-explosion sites, searching prison cells for contraband, and restocking ambulances with emergency medical supplies. Edwin Tong said the Home Team views this technology as a means to augment rather than replace officers, especially given that Singapore faces manpower constraints and operates in a dense urban environment.

H2RC will support the full embodied AI development cycle, including motion capture, teleoperation, human demonstrations and simulation used to generate training data. The center will also train and evaluate vision-language-action (VLA) models, connecting what the robot sees and understands with the physical actions it takes.

HTX points out that public safety robots need specialized data that cannot simply be bought or borrowed from industrial applications, and H2RC will use realistic models and operational scenarios to collect, review and annotate data. Edwin Tong said robots trained on the factory floor will not automatically know how to operate safely at an emergency scene, so Home Team-specific data is at the core of the program.

This means H2RC's output is not just robot hardware, but a data collection and annotation process. Whether the center's 29,000-square-foot scale matches the amount of training data required has not been disclosed.

HTX and ST Engineering signed a memorandum of understanding at the opening ceremony, covering joint research and development, technology and platform integration, industry and academic collaboration, and cybersecurity. HTX is also working with Singtel RE:AI to upgrade its NGINE sovereign AI infrastructure with Nvidia Grace Blackwell GB300 GPUs, to support embodied AI and multimodal model training for H2RC and other Home Team applications.

These two partnerships correspond respectively to the robot body and integration, and to the computing foundation. However, the specific outputs and timelines of the partnerships with ST Engineering and Singtel RE:AI have not been explained.

Development will go through capability building, trials and validation stages, and cybersecurity and reliability testing must be completed before deployment into real operations. This is a clear pre-deployment condition, and it also means the 2028 goal is not simply a technology demonstration deadline.

The actual performance and reliability of VLA models in public safety scenarios have not been disclosed, and the real-world effectiveness of humanoid robots in scenarios such as hazardous materials and post-explosion sites has not been verified. Whether the first humanoid robot can enter service on schedule before 2028 remains uncertain.