Self-driving food delivery robot to be demonstrated in Songdo, Incheon

[Smart City Today]

The first living lab of the indoor self-driving robot demonstration will be completed at Incheon Startup Park and will be expanded to Incheon Global Campus (IGC), apartments, and shopping malls in Incheon.

The Incheon Free Economic Zone Authority announced that it has recently successfully completed Season 1 related to the "Last Mile Citizen-led Living Lab," which was promoted as part of the "2022 Smart City Innovation Technology Discovery Project" organized by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, and will expand robot delivery in various environments to April next year.

The "Last Mile Citizen-led Living Lab," which will be held in a total of three seasons, will be operated as a citizen-led living lab with a total of 150 participants in the Living Lab.

Season 2 will begin in November for students working at IGC centered on the "working space" and Season 3 will start in January next year for apartments and Hyundai Premium Outlets centered on the "living space". They will be completed around April next year. In this process, the Incheon Economic Office plans to demonstrate services such as urban delivery in various daily lives with ordinary citizens.

The Season 1 project, which began early last month, was completed with a ceremony at the end of last month for Incheon Startup Park, where more than 80 companies and 500 innovative company workers moved in after employees found various ideas and service improvements through the indoor autonomous robot Living Lab.

The project aimed to solve the city delivery problem through a citizen-led Living Lab by operating indoor self-driving delivery robots linked to city delivery platforms by Incheon Techno Park, Yonsei University Industry-Academic Cooperation Group, Korea Stanford Research Institute, Mesh Korea, and Bear Robotics. In this regard, the Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ) was finally selected as a national competition project to discover smart innovation technologies in April.

Songdo International City, where the demonstration services are being processed, is a new city with high-rise buildings and single-person households and has been suffering from various problems such as a decrease in delivery productivity, a shortage of manpower, and restrictions on the delivery of high-rise buildings. In addition, problems such as accessibility and security issues are also occurring in the delivery and delivery process of couriers.

Smart City Living Lab is a technique that is already used in various smart city projects overseas by taking the lead in finding and improving services with citizens and workers who are the service users to solve various urban problems with smart technology.

Jang Byung-hyun, head of the planning and coordination division of the Incheon Economic Office, said, "This Last-Mile Delivery citizen-led living lab is very meaningful in introducing innovative smart city services and creating a smart city innovation ecosystem through civic, private, and public partnerships." And he added, "We expect to establish ourselves as a regional innovation platform that fosters various UrbanTech companies that provide smart city services."