[Yonhap Photo]
SEOUL -- South Korea's top telecom company KT has forged an alliance with an autonomous driving solution company to develop self-driving smart buses that could be placed into a test run by the end of this year.
KT said Thursday that it has signed a partnership deal with Unmanned Solution, a Seoul-based technology developer. "Our first self-developed autonomous vehicle will be a shuttle bus," KT's assistant public relations manager Kim Jung-jun told Aju News.
KT will try to commercialize autonomous vehicles for public use if the test run is successful, starting with smart buses, Kim said, adding his company would develop a self-driving single-seater later and use autonomous vehicles for an on-demand ride-hailing service.
KT will establish V2X (vehicle to everything), a communications infrastructure needed for the connection of autonomous vehicles to the main control platform and use big data to analyze driving patterns. Unmanned Solution will focus on hardware and self-driving solutions.
In a bid to commercialize a 5G network and related technologies by 2020, KT carried out the test run of smart buses at the venue of this year's Winter Olympics in February.
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
