Kakao Mobility announced on the 5th that it will introduce an indoor delivery service using robots at its in-house cafe through collaboration with LG Electronics.
Last June, Kakao Mobility signed a business agreement with LG Electronics for "joint development of services through technology collaboration in the future mobility sector and expansion of the mobility ecosystem," and announced plans to cooperate in discovering indoor and outdoor autonomous robot delivery service models.
This service is Kakao Mobility's first robot delivery, where Kakao Mobility employees order beverages from the in-house cafe via an ordering app, and the delivery robot picks up the food and drinks and delivers them to the floor where the orderer is located. LG Electronics' robot CLOi solution is responsible for the technology control and delivery necessary for robot operation.
Kakao Mobility developed the "robot platform," which acts as a mediator between the ordering app and the robot. The robot platform ▲ standardizes delivery orders, which vary depending on service methods and industries, into a form that robots can understand, and ▲ handles control and dispatch necessary for service operation, such as delivery task planning, dispatching, routing, robot control, and operational data analysis. It optimizes the matching of demand (delivery orders) and supply (robots) so that each robot can optimally process various types of orders.
Although the driving technology of robot devices has been advanced to a level suitable for commercialization, there have been many difficulties in actually implementing commercial services using robots. This is because the delivery order formats differ for each ordering location, causing robots to perform tasks only for specific stores, or services could only be operated in environments equipped with robot operation infrastructure throughout the building, such as smart buildings.
With the application of Kakao Mobility's robot platform, robots can receive orders from various ordering locations and perform complex services or bundled deliveries. For example, a robot can deliver cafe beverages within a building while simultaneously bundling mail deliveries to destinations along its route.
Even in general buildings without robot-friendly infrastructure such as dedicated elevators or sensors inside the building, robot delivery can be easily introduced by utilizing existing assets. With the introduction of the platform to robot delivery services enabling these changes, the scope of robot delivery services is expected to expand from specific stores to building units, increasing the productivity per robot and accelerating the commercialization of robot delivery services.
Kakao Mobility expects to maximize synergy with robot delivery services as it possesses parking lots that can serve as robot hubs and various mobility and logistics service bases that can be linked with robots during robot delivery service operations.
In the future, Kakao Mobility plans to apply high-precision map creation technology to the robot platform to help customers who want to introduce robot services quickly build and automatically update high-precision maps optimized for each building environment. It plans to contribute to revitalizing the domestic robot ecosystem by introducing an open robot platform that can be combined with various services such as mail delivery, F&B delivery, baggage delivery, and drive-thru.
Jang Sung-wook, head of Kakao Mobility's Future Mobility Research Center, said, "The platform capabilities that Kakao Mobility has accumulated, such as AI dispatch, route optimization, and high-precision map creation, are essential core technologies required across future mobility technologies." He added, "Based on these capabilities, we will build an open robot platform and implement robot delivery services that can be immediately applied in current robot driving technologies and building environments to accelerate the commercialization of robot services."
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