Kakao Mobility has opened 'NEMO Garage', a future mobility research institute

[Smart City Today]

Kakao Mobility announced on the 16th that it has opened 'NEMO (Next Mobility) Garage', a research institute for future mobile research and digital twin construction, in Dangsan-dong, Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul.

Kakao Mobility has established an in-house factory by bringing together hardware research facilities and manpower necessary for self-driving mobile research and digital twin construction. It will expand its research area from platform technology development to hardware development such as future mobile devices and infrastructure.

NEMO Garage was built with a total floor area of 2,734㎡ on six floors.

The institute has a ▲ Maker space that can make hardware prototypes and parts using 3D printing farms, PCB printers, and reverse design scanners, ▲ Data storage infrastructure to reduce data security and service implementation time, and ▲ a Digital twin factory that can develop digital twin solutions from data acquisition to update for digital twin construction.

It is also equipped with a test bed for performance experiments of self-driving vehicles and mapping robots for map construction, indoor and outdoor complex positioning technology verification, and sensor calibration (calibration). The company explains that the entire process from design to prototyping and verification can be carried out in one place.

A related team under the Kakao Mobility Future Mobility Research Institute will reside in NEMO Garage and study various mobile objects that can be applied to the Kakao T platform. It will also carry out technology development and business cooperation for digital twin production. To this end, the mobile mapping system (MMS) equipment 'ARGOS' for high-precision map construction has been optimized for each necessary environment and laid the foundation for self-production.

Kakao Mobility plans to study smart mobility infrastructure technologies such as edge infrastructure, vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2X), autonomous parking, infrastructure-based autonomous driving, and robotics through NEMO Garage in the future. In the long run, the research area will be expanded to develop smart mobility vehicles such as purpose-based mobility vehicles (PVs) and vehicles (SDVs) implemented in software.

Jang Sung-wook, head of Kakao Mobility Future Mobility Research Institute, said, "We are the first platform company to secure a dedicated autonomous driving and digital twin research institute specializing in future mobility technology. We will try to expand our global expansion opportunities through bold and active investment in future mobility technology and digital twin."