LG Innotek is accelerating its lead in the artificial intelligence market for recognizing real-world road environments by joining forces with the nation’s largest mobility platform company. LG Innotek announced on the 20th that it has signed a business agreement with Kakao Mobility focused on the joint development of autonomous driving solutions.

This alliance is drawing attention as it integrates the core competencies of leading players in both hardware and software. The two companies plan to combine LG Innotek’s optical perception technology with Kakao Mobility’s extensive vehicle operation infrastructure and program control capabilities to develop next-generation autonomous driving systems.

The new autonomous driving solution will incorporate LG Innotek’s high-performance cameras, radars, and lidars—comprehensive sensing components specially designed to suit Kakao Mobility’s transportation service environment—along with Kakao Mobility’s core software. In addition, the two companies agreed to closely cooperate on collecting actual road-driving information, a prerequisite for realizing fully autonomous driving.

By securing high-quality real-time driving data generated during passenger transportation, LG Innotek has created an opportunity to enhance the completeness of its sensor modules. Kakao Mobility, for its part, plans to significantly improve system reliability by embedding world-class optical technology into its integrated data management system, which centralizes the entire process from data collection to machine learning and deployment.

Kakao Mobility CEO Ryu Geung-seon assessed that cooperation with a leading hardware company has accelerated the internalization of end-to-end core technologies for autonomous driving, and stated that the company aims to enhance the overall competitiveness of the domestic mobility ecosystem through this strategic partnership.

LG Innotek CEO Moon Hyuk-soo said that, as the completeness of autonomous driving depends on securing precise data, this collaboration will serve as a watershed in advancing the company’s sensing technology. He added that LG Innotek aspires to become a leading provider of customized solutions across the entire spectrum of physical AI sensing domains based on real-world objects, including not only vehicles but also robots and drones.

Meanwhile, LG Innotek is rapidly shifting the optical manufacturing capabilities it has built up in its smartphone components business toward physical AI fields such as mobility and robotics.

The company possesses all three core sensor technologies—camera, radar, and lidar—that are central to driver assistance systems, and is viewed as having a strong advantage in responding flexibly to customer demands. The company has presented a mid- to long-term roadmap to achieve annual sales of KRW 2 trillion in the mobility sensor business segment alone by 2030.

To this end, LG Innotek has recently been focusing on strengthening its dominance in next-generation markets, including forming a technology partnership with global autonomous driving simulation company Applied Intuition and launching the development of a visual perception system for humanoids in collaboration with robotics specialist Boston Dynamics.

Popular News