According to a South Korean news agency, one of the country’s largest car makers, Hyundai Motor Group, will establish an artificial intelligence robot research institute in the United States. They have to enhance the competitiveness of future industries such as robotics and autonomous driving while consolidating the status of ан intelligent mobility solution provider.
The new artificial intelligence robot research institute will be located in Cambridge, the Boston metropolitan area of Massachusetts. Moreover, its three subsidiaries, Hyundai Motor, Kia, and Hyundai Mobis, will invest $424 million for this purpose ($211.9 million, $127.1 million, and $84.7 million, respectively).
The institute will “invest resources across the technical areas of cognitive AI, athletic AI, and organic hardware design, with each discipline contributing to progress in advanced machine capabilities,” Hyundai said in a release on the website.
You probably know that a year ago, Hyundai Motor Group acquired Boston Dynamics, a robotic engineering technology development company. The latter will also hold a small stake in the institute.
According to reports, the institute will give priority to ensuring the mastery of the basic technologies for the development of a new generation of robots, that is, while developing technologies such as robot motion intelligence and cognitive functions, it will challenge the controllable limits of robots through externally collected data. The institute also plans to develop artificial intelligence models that can improve the generality of robots.
Hyundai Motor Group has invested in developing automotive software and related mobility technologies. Among its products, we can mention Software Defined Vehicles (SDVs). This is a concept that allows the vehicle’s software capability to assess the quality of the car and driving.
Apart from this, Hyundai Motor will also establish a new software center in South Korea. The latter will accelerate efforts toward an expansion into autonomous driving, electrification, and other advanced auto technologies.
In this regard, we have to mention that Hyundai has acquired 42dot, a Seoul-based autonomous driving software, and mobility platform startup, for 274.6 billion won ($211.1 million).