Aju Business Daily

SEOUL -- South Korea's top telecom company, KT, partnered with the holding company of Hyundai Heavy Industries, the world's largest shipbuilder, to develop 5G-connected robots and smart factory platforms. They agreed to explore the smart factory market together and expand their businesses globally.

Under an agreement signed on Sunday, the two companies would cooperate in artificial intelligence and machine vision, an industrial method which is used to provide imaging-based automatic inspection and analysis for automatic inspection, process control, and robot guidance.

KT will provide telecom infrastructure and ICT platforms while Hyundai Heavy will provide robots, automated facilities and smart factory solutions. Hyundai Heavy's holding company has Hyundai Robotics, a top industrial robot maker in South Korea, under its wing.

The establishment of 5G networks in South Korea triggered a flurry of business cooperation in various industrial sectors, especially in robots and smart factories, while mobile carriers have tried to develop 5G edge cloud-based solutions for businesses.

In February, KT teamed up with Cognex, an American developer of machine vision, to commercialize a 5G-based edge cloud-based machine vision solution. Machine vision technology uses software and sensors in automated manufacturing facilities to identify parts, detect defects and guide assembly robots.

A month later, KT partnered with an e-commerce wing of South Korea's fashion wholesaler apM Group and RS Automation to develop a 5G-based smart factory solution for sewing factories and develop intelligent robots.

SK Telecom, the country's top mobile carrier, has partnered with MobiledgeX, a San Francisco-based edge computing company. Edge cloud, or edge computing, is a computing infrastructure established close to the sources of data such as Internet of things (IoT) devices and machines inside a smart factory. It is capable of gathering and analyzing data at the sources of data.

LG Electronics has made a strategic investment in Bossa Nova Robotics, a San Francisco-based startup that creates retail robots. In April, the company partnered with CJ Foodville, the franchise restaurant wing of South Korean entertainment and food conglomerate CJ, to develop food robots that would help workers and reduce their workload at restaurants.