LG's robot to be used in facility diagnosis of POSCO's steel mill

LG Electronics' AI-based self-driving robot is on patrol at POSCO's Gwangyang steel plant during a two-day demonstration earlier this week. LG said Wednesday that it conducted the demonstration for unmanned facility management using the robot in collaboration with POSCO Holdings for two days on Monday and Tuesday. Courtesy of LG Electronics

LG Electronics’ AI-based self-driving robots can be widely used for facility diagnosis at hazardous worksites in the future, the company said Wednesday, after completing a two-day demonstration of unmanned facility management using its robot at POSCO’s Gwangyang steel plant.

LG said the robot completed its facility management mission in the electrical room of the steel plant in Gwangyang, South Jeolla Province, on Monday and Tuesday.

The self-driving robot autonomously created a path for patrolling the electrical room, which is larger in area than two football fields, avoiding drains and other obstacles. It also checked the operating status of various equipment located throughout the electrical room, such as power cables, transformers and reactors, and sent the results to the company's control room.

This demonstration project was carried out as part of a business agreement between LG Electronics and POSCO Holdings. In May, the two companies signed a business agreement for the development of technologies in the fields of robots, AI and 5G networks, and conducted the first stage of a demonstration in July to control the driving of a semi-autonomous robot.

“We equipped the robot with cameras and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors. The robot uses the information acquired from the sensors to recognize its surroundings more accurately,” LG said. “It has a high recognition rate even in low-light environments such as basements or places where safety fences are installed around equipment. If it detects abnormal temperatures in various equipment in the electrical room using the temperature information obtained from its thermal imaging camera, it will take a picture and send an alert to the control room.”

The company added that it enhanced the heatproof and cooling performance of the robot as an environment like the electric room of a steel mill is hot and has a lot of high-voltage equipment. Also, the robot can operate stably even in specific environments by allowing workers to monitor the robot's driving information from a control room and control it remotely if necessary.

LG and POSCO said they will accelerate the creation of more efficient and safer manufacturing sites by sharing their respective smart factory technological capabilities through collaboration.

“We will enhance our technological capabilities further by verifying smart factory technologies such as robots, AI and communications at various manufacturing sites,” said Kim Byoung-hoon, chief technology officer of LG Electronics. “We will strengthen our manufacturing competitiveness with intelligent autonomous factory technology for the future."