LAVER LABS

NAVER’s second headquarters is currently under construction, located aside the NAVER Green Factory building. NAVER’s future technologies including robotics, autonomous driving, cloud, and AI are being integrated in this new building. 5G is another important technology that is being used. Then why is 5G so important to NAVER LABS researchers? We heard from the researchers themselves.

Q. The 5G experimental station that has been approved in NAVER LABS’ office will soon be transferred to NAVER’s second headquarters. What does this mean?

Sang Chul Kang) First, let me briefly explain NAVER’s second headquarters. NAVER’s second headquarters was designed to be a robot-friendly building, where robots and humans can coexist efficiently. For example, there are robot-only elevators and passages, and a great number of robots will be moving around in the building. One interesting feature of these robots is that the computer, which acts as their brain, will be located on NAVER Cloud instead of on the robot itself. We believe this cloud robotics technology will be the key to popularization of service robots. This is because highly intelligent robots can be made at a low cost if the cloud can replace the brains of individual robots. Communications performance between the cloud and the robots is critical to realize this. That’s why we’ve been focusing our attention on 5G.

Jungheok Kim) 5G network has extremely high performance. It is fundamentally different from 3G or LTE. Before, communication between people was the main area of focus. But starting from 5G, communication between objects surrounding people has been strengthened drastically. Which object can best utilize 5G’s IoT communication performance? Robots.

Q. When did the first efforts to connect 5G and robotics technology begin?

Kang) In fact, NAVER had already carried out the world’s first 5G brainless robot demonstration at CES in January 2019. This was when 5G had not yet been commercialized in any country in the world. Thus, this success was very sensational and received much attention both from the media and on-site. We believe we suggested an important direction for 5G and robots at this time. But there was some stagnation after CES. It was difficult to set up 5G and use it as we wanted.

Kim) Fortunately, policy support for local 5G networks soon began actively in Korea as well. Network frequency can be thought of as a resource owned by each country, and so, policies were created to allow research that can maximize the potential of this resource. In other countries, local 5G network is also called local 5G, private 5G, or 5G LAN. It refers to the technology that allows general institutions or corporations to create 5G networks in a certain area. Being able to liberally use this frequency is meaningful, but even more important is the fact that frequency settings can be optimized and used according to one’s particular purpose.

Q. Why is it important to optimize the frequency settings according a certain purpose?

Kang) Why do we use 5G in robotics research? The answer is to connect with the cloud. Instead of simply connecting them, our goal is to maximize the potential of the cloud and robots by using 5G.

Kim) However, robots are different from smartphones. For example, the proportion of uploads and downloads are different. In smartphones, downloads usually take up a large proportion, so the communications network for smartphones is optimized for this. In contrast, the proportion of uploads and downloads is similar for robots. Both information from sensors and commands to process and re-transmit this information must go back and forth very quickly between robots and the cloud. This is only one example, but the real requirements are much more diverse and detailed. Thus, we need to test multiple methods and find the most effective setting. The virtuous cycle of optimizing the network environment to fit the research purpose and optimizing robots to fit the network is very important.

Q. What is the current status and goals for the future?

Kim) We’ve currently received approval for a 5G experimental station which we are using for our research, and are planning to use local 5G networks following local 5G frequency allocation policies. Local network frequency also has multiple bandwidths, each with unique features and strengths. At this point, we are mainly conducting research and development, and also reviewing actual robot service use cases for the future. Since we have a massive testbed, our second headquarters, it’s very meaningful that that we can experiment here and prepare to approach the users.

Kang) What we have discovered so far is that robots and 5G are a great match, with enormous synergy. Moreover, since this experiment is being conducted with robots with the best, state-of-the-art IoT communications technologies, it’s easy to expand research results into other research fields. For instance, 5G communications technology can be integrated well with NAVER LABS’ existing research in autonomous driving, digital twin, XR metaverse, etc.

Kim) Shortly from now, NAVER’s second headquarters will be a reference for smart buildings where local 5G network and cloud-based robots move around providing services. It will be a great challenge. We believe that this could be the starting point of technologies that connect NAVER’s online world to the offline world.