The New York Times at Galaxy Robot Park — The Limits It Found and Why a Daily Stage Matters

The short answer — what The New York Times saw at Galaxy Robot Park, and what it flagged

The New York Times visited Galaxy Robot Park in Godeok-dong, Gangdong-gu, Seoul, and reported on both where humanoid robots stand today and where they could go. As relayed on October 7, 2026 by Robot Newspaper (irobotnews.com), a Korean robotics trade outlet, the coverage breaks down into three parts.

The criticism is sharp. But where it was made deserves its own reading: a permanent venue that opens its doors every day. The gaps The New York Times identified surfaced not in an edited demo video, but on a live floor where real audiences come and go.

What The New York Times saw at the humanoid robot theme park in Godeok, Seoul

Galaxy Robot Park is a robot theme park of about 16,500㎡ (5,000 pyeong) that Galaxy Corporation opened in Godeok-dong, Gangdong-gu, Seoul. After a pre-opening in July 2026, it officially opened on August 21, having welcomed 20,000 visitors before the official launch. CEO Choi Yong-ho said in New York on September 21, 2026 that paid attendance had reached about 28,000.

The main attraction The New York Times singled out was a show in which humanoid robots dance and perform taekwondo to K-pop. To fast-tempo tracks, the robots swung their arms and spun through precise sequences. The reporters experienced the space firsthand, from the shows that pair K-pop with humanoids to robots that interact with visitors.

This is not the first time a global outlet has come calling. The BBC, Bloomberg and Japan's TV Tokyo covered Robot Park before it. The wider arc of international coverage is collected in From the BBC to Bloomberg — How the International Press Recorded Galaxy Corporation in 2026.

The limits it flagged — are the robots remote controlled, how polished is the motion, and the expectations gap

The report identified three limits.

First, remote operation. The humanoids that waved at visitors and tried to shake hands appeared to act on their own, but they were in fact being moved by a nearby operator with a controller. The boxing and soccer robots were also remotely operated.

Second, the polish of the motion. Movements that looked precise to fast music became somewhat awkward to slower tracks, and next to human taekwondo athletes the robots fell short in power and range of motion.

Third, the gap between expectation and reality. The New York Times wrote that the robots did not match the dazzling humanoid feats that have gone viral on YouTube and on stage, and warned that flashy performances and videos can create unrealistic expectations about what robots can actually do. Even movements that look complex, it explained, are mostly pre-programmed sequences.

None of this is something the company has hidden. Remote operation is an operating model Galaxy has disclosed itself. At its first robot stage in December 2025, one operator handled one robot; as of August 2026, one operator controls twelve robots at once from a single console. The company's stated goal is to scale to 100 robots. These figures are laid out in our Robot Park testbed explainer. Not full autonomy, but a stage that people and robots build together: that is the most accurate description of where Galaxy's robot performances stand today.

A “special performance” is not a “daily performance”

Alan Fern, a professor of robotics at Oregon State University, told The New York Times that there is a difference between robots optimized for a special performance and robots that perform repeatedly, every day, in a commercial setting.

Fern explained that the more often robots repeat complex movements, the higher their risk of breakdown and their maintenance costs can climb. Many viral humanoid videos are the product of conditions tuned for a single shoot, where only one successful take has to survive. A performance in a commercial venue is different. The curtain goes up at a set time, and the same moves have to be repeated several times a day in front of an audience that has paid to be there.

That difference overlaps with the very reason Galaxy Robot Park exists. Since the official opening, the company has set a target of at least four permanent shows a day and more than 1,000 a year. The breakdown risk and maintenance costs Fern described are not hypotheses here; they are daily operating problems. Which movements hold up under repetition, which parts wear out first, what it takes to keep a single show running: these are answers a film set never produces.

That is why a less spectacular stage can tell you more. What The New York Times saw was not a one-off staged for the camera, but a show in permanent operation.

Field experience with tens of thousands of visitors — Robot Park as a testbed

Galaxy Corporation operates Galaxy Robot Park both as a visitor attraction and as a testbed for physical AI. Multiple types of robots run every day, and tens of thousands of visitors pass in front of them. The pre-opening period alone drew 20,000 visitors, and as of September 2026 paid attendance stood at about 28,000. With the official opening, 17 new robot types joined the lineup, so performance robots that dance K-pop choreography and service robots that draw portraits, play the piano and make drinks now run side by side within the same operating hours.

What builds up at this scale is a kind of experience that is hard to get in a lab.

• Operational experience — tying very different robot models into a single operating system, running them daily, and repeating maintenance and changeovers between shows.
• Audience response — learning from the real reactions of tens of thousands of people which movements get a crowd going and which experiences bring visitors back.
• Real-world interaction — in boxing and hands-on programs where visitors control the robots themselves, the moment when people and robots meet in the same space repeats every day.

The New York Times pointed to a shortage of physical data as the reason humanoids have not made the kind of leap generative AI has. Generative AI can learn from the vast data of the internet, while humanoids have relatively little data gathered from moving through real environments and handling objects. A single permanent venue cannot close that gap on its own. But by adding hours, every day, in which people and robots meet in a real environment, it is one of the places where that data comes into being. Japan's TV Tokyo, in a September 2026 report, likewise described Robot Park as a stage for testing newly developed robots and a place where the data needed for software development is gathered (our summary of the broadcast).

The New York Times also observed that for certain tasks, purpose-built robots may be more efficient than humanoids; a factory assembly robot has no need for human-like legs or a face. For a factory, that is true. Entertainment is another matter. What visitors wave at and offer a handshake to is something in human form, and K-pop group choreography is written for the human body. On stage, the human-like form is itself the function. Why Galaxy chose a stage rather than a factory as its first field is covered in Why K-pop choreography is the benchmark for humanoid robots.

Still, a step toward the future

The New York Times argued that even as humanoids emerge as a centerpiece of the robotics industry, there is a sizable gap between vision and reality, and between an appearance that suggests intelligence and what the machines can actually do. Investors are hoping for the same kind of breakthrough in humanoids that the AI industry saw after ChatGPT launched in 2022, but when it will come remains unclear, the paper concluded.

The gap is real. There are broadly two ways to narrow it: wait in the lab for a breakthrough, or open a live venue now with the technology that exists and build improvements inside it. Galaxy Corporation chose the second. Today's stage, with remote operation in the mix, is a starting point rather than a finished product. Going from one operator per robot to one operator for twelve took about eight months.

That a global news organization came to a permanent robot venue in Seoul and documented it, limits included, is meaningful in itself. It signals that humanoids have moved beyond on-screen demos into a phase where they greet audiences in a space that opens every day. The story of how this venue came together is in Robot Park Story, and visitor information is in the Galaxy Robot Park guide.

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