Moray is hosting a virtual autonomous driving challenge to expand its technological foundation in the autonomous driving field, which is attracting attention as a next-generation growth engine, foster talent, and provide students with experience in the field.

Morai announced on the 28th that it will hold the first Seoul Virtual Autonomous Driving Challenge, which will compete students' autonomous driving skills in a digital twin environment.

Hosted by Morai and the Seoul Metropolitan Government, and sponsored by the Korea Transportation Safety Authority's Automobile Safety Research Institute, Naver Cloud, Naver Labs, and AfreecaTV.

MORAI will oversee the overall planning and operation of the competition, provide its simulation platform, MORAI SIM, and provide training on how to use simulation tools and autonomous driving technology so that participating students can utilize autonomous driving simulation functions.

In this competition, Naver Cloud and Naver Labs will provide digital twin data produced with their proprietary solution ALIKE, including Naver Cloud Platform Credits, to enable stable and simultaneous simulation of various scenarios.

This allows participants to experience various simulations on an autonomous driving platform that implements an environment identical to the real one.

Participants will compete in Morai's simulation environment, demonstrating their self-developed autonomous driving algorithm capabilities.

Driving on a highway at a designated speed with the Sangam-dong downtown area as the background, implemented as a digital twin It will perform various autonomous driving missions, such as compliance, traffic light compliance, and emergency response.

The Seoul Virtual Autonomous Driving Challenge is open to anyone from high school to graduate school in South Korea, and each team can consist of 3 to 5 people.

Applications can be submitted from August 25 to September 15 through the competition website (www.morai.ai/svadc). Afterwards, documents will be reviewed, followed by preliminary screening and final competition.

The finals will be held on Monday, October 30th at the Sangam Africa Coliseum, the largest e-sports stadium in Korea, for the 20 teams that passed the preliminaries.

Five of the 20 teams that advance to the finals will be awarded the Seoul Mayor's Award, and the top three winners will also receive various special benefits, including a pass to the document screening process for Naver Labs' 2024 new employee recruitment and a small amount of prize money.

Eom Seong-bok, director of the Korea Transportation Safety Authority's Automobile Safety Research Institute, said, "Verifying the safety of algorithms by virtualizing actual road environments and recreating various traffic flows and events will be an important indicator for future safety evaluations of autonomous vehicles." He added, "I hope that this competition will serve as an opportunity to increase public interest in the related field and secure technical personnel, thereby contributing to the commercialization of safe autonomous vehicles."

Han Sang-young, Senior Vice President of Strategy & Planning at Naver Cloud, said, “For autonomous driving simulation, it is important to provide high-performance cloud infrastructure with guaranteed stability and security.” He added, “We plan to support large-scale scenario testing so that it can be conducted stably without bottlenecks, and we hope that this will be an opportunity to expand the domestic cloud infrastructure base in the autonomous driving technology field.”

Baek Jong-yoon, head of Naver Labs, said, “The value of digital twins that are linked to the real world is the key to this competition. He said, "I hope that this competition will be a good opportunity to showcase our achievements," and added, "I hope that this will serve as a catalyst for new research into digital twin-based autonomous vehicles, robots, and even smart cities."

Jeong Ji-won, CEO of Morai, said, "With the advent of the autonomous driving era, securing talent with autonomous driving technology capabilities has become crucial. Morai organized this competition to lay the foundation for revitalizing the autonomous driving industry and to support autonomous driving technology education and talent development for university students. We believe this will provide an opportunity for university students, who will play a leading role in autonomous driving technology development in the future, to build their technical capabilities. We will continue to work towards the advancement of the autonomous driving industry."