SEONGNAM, South Korea, Could 25 (Reuters) – On weekdays, South Korean tech firm Naver Corp’s (035420.KS) new headquarters close to Seoul resembles a scene straight out of a science-fiction film, with some 40 robots ambling throughout flooring and delivering parcels and Starbucks espresso to people.
The Rookies, because the robots are referred to as, weave their method between folks and even take a see-through elevator reserved for them to traverse the constructing’s 28 flooring. Crucially for Naver, the Rookies’ brains are saved within the cloud and related to the robots through a non-public superfast 5G community.
Whereas the robots appear to be doing their jobs effectively, senior Naver executives are cautious on the business way forward for the fledgling robotic enterprise, on which the corporate has already invested $550 million, as 5G expertise presents challenges.
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“This can be a long-term activity,” Seok Sang-ok, CEO of R&D arm Naver Labs, which leads the robots challenge, advised Reuters, declining to make any monetary forecasts for the enterprise.
Naver is South Korea’s dominant search portal operator and one in all its 10 most beneficial listed corporations with a market capitalisation of $35 billion. It has been making a push into 5G, turning into the nation’s first non-telecoms firm to be allowed to run a domestically licensed 5G community in December.
Naver’s cautious outlook for the robots enterprise underscores the challenges corporations face in turning progressive concepts that 5G has promised into business successes.
These embrace regulatory hurdles involving new providers like autonomous driving, patchy community rollouts and incremental upgrades in applied sciences.
And even in a technologically superior nation corresponding to South Korea, Asia’s 5G pioneer which launched a fifth-generation cellular community in 2019, demand for the service has remained muted and telcos have been reluctant to take a position the large sums wanted to ramp up connection speeds to help providers like autonomous driving. learn extra
COST ADVANTAGE?
Whereas Naver’s robots at present carry out primary capabilities and their reliability is being examined in comparatively managed settings, Naver executives are banking on its affordability as a USP for wider use.
Naver declined to reveal the robots’ worth, however mentioned the removing of the central processing unit and graphics processing unit from the robotic and maintaining its “mind” within the cloud can scale back a unit’s price by greater than $1,500.
“5G’s low latency is the important thing to ditching computer systems inside robots so it may well entry giant computing energy limitless by robotic dimension,” mentioned Seok.
Naver plans to extend the variety of robots to 100 this yr and in addition allow them perform set-up and upkeep work at its huge knowledge centre that can be accomplished in 2023. The centre will span 300,000 sq. metres and be capable to function a minimum of 100,000 servers, matching the dimensions of Microsoft or Apple’s largest knowledge centres, in keeping with the corporate.
“5G is a community with many benefits, however it must be optimised for robots as a substitute of telephones. Nobody can do it, however we’re doing it,” mentioned Naver Labs’ Gained Choong-lyol within the interview.
($1 = 1,268.6200 received)
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Reporting by Joyce Lee and Byungwook Kim; Modifying by Miyoung Kim and Muralikumar Anantharaman
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