[DigitalToday reporter Seok Dae-geon (석대건)] LG Innotek said on Monday it will operate "self-driving sensing data collection vehicles" in South Korea with autonomous driving software company Applied Intuition. The two companies formed a strategic partnership in March to advance sensing solutions. Operations will start mainly in the Seoul, Incheon and Gyeonggi areas.

The company said LG Innotek plans to operate about 20 vehicles in total in South Korea by 2028, combining data collection vehicles and autonomous driving software development vehicles. The software development vehicles will be split into a mode where the software analyses data while a driver controls the vehicle, and a mode where the software directly controls the vehicle to verify actual autonomous driving.

It is unusual for a sensor company to collect autonomous driving data directly in this way. Global autonomous driving companies continue to invest heavily in fleet operations, but cases in which a sensing solutions company directly runs a fleet are rare even in the industry.

The collection vehicles will be equipped with sensors such as cameras, radar and lidar. Processing the data obtained while driving produces information such as road conditions, vehicle movements, object locations and weather changes. The company plans to combine this data with a virtual environment, a digital twin, to improve performance by sensor and verify systems. Personal information such as pedestrians' faces or vehicle licence plates will be used after de-identification processing.

The focus is sensor fusion technology and edge-case data. Sensor fusion is a technology that combines and calibrates camera images, radar distance and speed, and lidar 3D spatial information to accurately recognise the surrounding environment. Edge cases are situations where performance is normally not an issue but recognition performance declines under specific conditions, such as black vehicles in torrential rain, strong backlight at tunnel exits, and irregular lanes at construction sites. The higher the level of autonomous driving, the greater the share of data from such exceptional situations.

LG Innotek plans to pursue new customer orders in North America, Europe and elsewhere based on the data it secures. Few companies in the world can supply all three modules - camera, radar and lidar - with in-house technology. Applied Intuition collection vehicles equipped with LG Innotek sensing modules will also operate in the United States, Europe and Japan. The company plans to identify areas for improvement in advance using real-world measured data and reflect them in module performance.

Min Joon (민죤), CTO at LG Innotek, said, "Autonomous driving solutions are evolving from advancing the performance of individual sensors to optimising sensors and software together based on data." He added, "By putting forward LG Innotek's own advanced integrated sensing solutions based on data, we will quickly pre-empt the physical AI sensing market, including autonomous driving."