A driverless car fitted with technologies of South Korea’s top wireless carrier SK Telecom has been cleared to drive around public Korean roads.

The company said on Wednesday it obtained temporary permission to test its self-driving car technologies from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) on real roads. With the permission, a car installed with the company’s autonomous car technologies will be able to run on the track at Seoul National University (SNU) and public roads starting this month. SK Telecom said the self-driving car, which was devised from Hyundai Motor Co.’s Genesis G80, already succeeded in completing its test-driving safely in rain.

The company hopes the follow-up test driving can help accelerate the development of its autonomous driving technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) software, three-dimensional (3D) high-definition map solution, and sensors detecting geographic features like a radar, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensor, and camera.

During the second half of this year, SK Telecom aims to test drive an autonomous car fitted with its fifth-generation (5G) network communication technology and 3D HD map. To enable this, the company will apply its vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication solution that will allow vehicles to exchange the traffic information in real time.

In addition, the company plans to apply big data collected from its mobile navigation map T Map with more than 10 million users to its self-driving algorithms to enable an autonomous car to renew driving paths based on traffic information gathered in real time.

By Lim Sung-hyun

[ⓒ Pulse by Maeil Business Newspaper & mk.co.kr, All rights reserved]