Launching KM Autonomous Driving Alliance
Demonstration support via 'Kakao T'
Promoting discovery and nurturing of new companies
Kakao Mobility creates a self-driving team.
It supports cooperation between domestic companies in each field with world-class technology and supports commercialization. It also promotes the participation of global companies to achieve technological perfection. This is to strengthen Kakao T, a service-type mobility platform with 28 million users. Kakao Mobility plans to discover new services through empirical data.
Kakao Mobility announced on the 6th that it would launch the 'KM Autonomous Driving Alliance Program'.
The KM autonomous driving alliance program aims to help commercialize individual autonomous driving technologies and promote cooperation between different fields.
Currently, companies in each field are developing autonomous driving technology; however, mobility services must have a wide range of service elements such as customer contact points, call/dispatcher systems, and operation policies. With the technology accumulated through Kakao T, Kakao Mobility plans to support dispatch, route creation, and arrival time calculation technology optimized for autonomous driving environments.
Kakao Mobility’s domestic partners are △ autonomous driving solution companies such as Autonomous A2Z, 'SWM', and 'Thor Drive’ △Autonomous truck software (SW) company 'Mars Auto' △Electric bus company 'Edison Motors,’ and △Autonomous driving infrastructure 'Stryx', a precision map system developer.
Its overseas partners are △DriveU, an Israel-based autonomous vehicle remote control solution company, and△Continental, a global intelligent mobility advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) supplier.
Kakao Mobility is also exploring the possibility of developing autonomous driving technology and service cooperation with strategic investors, LG Group, GS Caltex and GS Energy, and Hanjin, which has recently established cooperative relationships with Kakao Mobility.
Kakao Mobility plans to integrate various solutions that by each partner possesses through business cooperation and joint technology research, and introduce it as a complete autonomous driving service that can be commercialized.
Kakao Mobility provides a mobility platform infrastructure for partners to reveal their technologies sooner. This will to help discover new service models based on autonomous driving. Kakao Mobility will not only use autonomous vehicles as a simple means of transportation, but also discover services such as shopping, watching movies, and consulting with experts using autonomous vehicles.
Kakao Mobility will establish a cooperative system between partner companies, and promote the discovery and cultivation of promising autonomous driving startups through the introduction of a partner technology certification system, an autonomous driving hackathon, and a developer contest. It plans to make large-scale investments in the autonomous driving field in the future.
Sung-Wook Jang, senior software engineer of Kakao Mobility Future Business Office, said, “Based on our platform capabilities, we will help various autonomous driving companies to quickly reveal their technologies and try out various business models. We will play a pivotal role so that the domestic autonomous driving industry can gain an edge in the global technology race.”
By Staff Reporter Jin-hyung Park (jin@etnews.com)