All of Gwangju Metropolitan City will be used, for the first time in Korea, as a citywide Autonomous Driving demonstration space. The government plans to begin actually operating Autonomous Driving cars on general roads in Gwangju as early as June and to gradually push toward fully driverless operation starting next year.
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport on the 21st announced a plan to promote an Autonomous Driving demonstration city that designates all of Gwangju as a pilot operating zone for Autonomous Driving cars. Until now, demonstrations were conducted only on some sections or specific routes, but this is the first time an entire city will be run as a single test bed.
The demonstration will run for about three years. The government will divide the demonstration into four stages according to the maturity of Autonomous Driving technology. Through this year, demonstrations will proceed with a safety manager riding in the vehicle, and starting next year, the plan is to shift to fully driverless Autonomous Driving without a manager onboard.
By April, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) will complete a call for participating corporations and select about three Autonomous Driving corporations. Two hundred vehicles for Autonomous Driving demonstrations will be allocated differentially to the selected corporations according to their technical level and operational capability. These vehicles will run 24 hours a day, including commute hours and nighttime, on actual roads across Gwangju—such as alleyways, areas with dwellings, downtown intersections, and underpasses.
The demonstration will expand in stages. It will start in areas where traffic conditions are relatively stable and then widen its scope to older downtown areas and the city center with heavier traffic. The aim is to ensure the Autonomous Driving AI sufficiently learns exceptional situations that occur across various times of day and complex traffic environments.
Through this demonstration, the government intends to solve the data acquisition problem, cited as a core task in Autonomous Driving technology development. Domestic Autonomous Driving demonstrations have so far been conducted on limited sections and at limited times, drawing criticism for a lack of training data. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) believes that only by accumulating large-scale real-road driving data can Korea narrow the gap in the Autonomous Driving technology race, which has been reorganized around the United States and China.
This demonstration is also a policy attempt to raise the level of Autonomous Driving technology by a notch. The Autonomous Driving car industry is classified by automation level from Level 0 (no Autonomous Driving) to Level 5 (full Autonomous Driving). The United States and China are assessed to have entered Level 4, where the vehicle can drive itself without driver intervention and respond to unexpected situations.
By contrast, the domestic technology level remains at Level 3, where the system handles driving only under specific conditions and driver intervention is required in emergencies. Through the Gwangju demonstration city, the government has set a goal of accumulating large-scale data in real traffic environments and, based on that, securing Level 4 Autonomous Driving technology by the year after next. The plan is to accelerate technological sophistication by simultaneously pursuing regulatory improvements and real-road demonstrations.
To that end, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) will support AI training for participating corporations by utilizing the high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) owned by the Gwangju National AI Data Center and will also parallel a method of revalidating data collected on actual roads in a virtual environment.
Minister Kim Yun-duk of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) said, "As Autonomous Driving technology is rapidly evolving around AI, it is difficult to gain competitiveness without large-scale verification on real roads," adding, "Gwangju's demonstration city will be an important turning point for narrowing the Autonomous Driving technology gap."