The Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) opened the Home Team Humanoid Robotics Centre (H2RC) on Wednesday, 30 September 2026, with a target to put the first humanoid robot alongside officers in a real operational setting by 2028.
“Our goal is clear: we aim to have the first humanoid robot working alongside Home Team officers in a real operational setting, performing defined tasks safely and reliably by 2028,” said Second Minister for Home Affairs Edwin Tong at the launch. “H2RC is the first centre of its kind dedicated specifically to humanoid robotics for public safety.”
The humanoid form was chosen because it adapts to environments built for people. Commercial humanoid work centres on manufacturing and household use, leaving embodied AI for public safety less developed. The 29,000 sq ft centre, roughly the size of six basketball courts, is built for realistic mock-ups, motion capture, teleoperation, human demonstration and simulation that generates training data.
Four use cases under exploration
- Handling hazardous materials (HazMat)
- Working in post-blast scenes
- Searching prison cells for contraband
- Restocking emergency supplies on ambulances
“We are augmenting our officers, not replacing them,” said Mr Tong. The push responds to Singapore’s manpower limits and dense, high-rise, close-proximity urban geography, where incidents leave little margin for error.
Engineers from HTX’s Robotics, Automation and Unmanned Systems (RAUS) Centre of Expertise run H2RC, and HTX’s NGINE AI infrastructure has been upgraded with Singtel RE:AI to run Singapore’s first operationalised NVIDIA GB300 GPUs. On launch day HTX and ST Engineering also signed a memorandum of understanding to deepen cooperation in the sector.
