Teleco firms promote AI-based autonomous driving technology

[Courtesy of SK telecom Co.]

The South Korean telecommunications industry is accelerating the advancement of autonomous driving technology based on artificial intelligence (AI).

SK telecom Co. said on Wednesday that it has been conducting a demonstration of autonomous driving robot technology based on its Telco Edge AI Infrastructure for two months since June 2024 at its office in Pangyo, Gyeonggi Province.

This demonstration was conducted to secure core technologies for indoor product transport and delivery robots that require high-precision positioning.

The company made autonomous driving robots perform various tasks. The Telco Edge AI Infrastructure is a telecommunications-only infrastructure that combines edge computing, which processes, analyzes, and stores data close to where it is generated, with AI technology.

SK telecom has advanced the technology that processes information received by a camera and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) from a robot moving through a complex building using AI while verifying the related robot technology and ultra-precision positioning technology.

SK telecom’s image-based sensor fusion position and spatial data generation technology, VLAM, was applied to the robot’s autonomous driving.

“Robot solutions utilizing Edge AI technology are suitable for protecting personal information and strengthening data security because data is processed on-site rather than in a central server,” an SK telecom official said. The company plans to develop business models based on the Telco Edge AI Infrastructure in various fields such as manufacturing, logistics, and services.

KT Corp. is promoting its own autonomous bus business. It has been conducting a pilot operation of an autonomous driving bus, Zuyaro, with Gyeonggi Province’s Anyang City since April 2024. Zuyaro supports autonomous driving with four LiDAR sensors, five cameras, and one radar, which detect distances using light.

KT has been working on advancing autonomous driving technology since 2022 and is producing visible results. It successfully developed a cloud-based autonomous vehicle operation platform, Mobility Makers, and has also introduced RoadMaster, an AI traffic situation prediction system.

It built an intelligent transportation system in Anyang City using this expertise in 2023.

“We expect that we will be able to expand to autonomous driving bus operation between regions in the future,” a KT official said.

For its part, LG Uplus Corp. is planning a control service for special vehicles. It will apply unmanned autonomous driving technology to urban environment management vehicles that perform quarantine and disinfection.

“We will develop the technology for unmanned autonomous vehicles based on 5G communication in 2024 and conduct 40,000 km of verification on actual roads by 2027,” an LG Uplus official said. “We will introduce an urban environment management service control center that connects vehicles, cleaning modules, and road infrastructure.”

The autonomous robot market is growing rapidly, with the global autonomous driving robot market is expected to grow by an annual average of 34 percent from $1.61 billion in 2021 to $22.15 billion in 2030, according to global market research firm Research and Markets.