ERIE, Pa. — HanBin Lee, a 2014 graduate of Penn State Behrend, was recently honored as one of 11 Penn State Alumni Achievement Award recipients. He is the first Korean person to receive the honor, which recognizes alumni 35 years of age and younger for outstanding professional accomplishments.
Lee is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Seoul Robotics, a South Korea-based company that offers solutions for self-driving vehicles. The company uses patented 3D-sensing technology to move vehicles without human intervention or sensors on the vehicle.
While serving in the South Korean army from 2014 to 2016, Lee was introduced to Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR, which uses light pulses to accurately represent an environment. He founded an online artificial-intelligence study group, where he met the future co-founders of Seoul Robotics. Together, they developed a software system for self-driving cars that relies on data from LiDAR sensors.
Today, the business employs 70 people across four continents. Lee and his team work with more than 100 companies, including BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo.
“HanBin has charted a remarkable course since his graduation from Behrend, and we are proud of his accomplishments,” Chancellor Ralph Ford said. “His dedication to his company, his innovative approach to his work and his global outlook are emblematic of what we envision for all Behrend graduates.”
Lee earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at Behrend after attending Penn State Hazleton for two years. We asked him about self-driving vehicle technology during a recent visit to Behrend.
Q: Seoul Robotics is a small company with big ambitions. How were you able to gain a foothold with the major automobile manufacturers?
Lee: The carmakers are trying to manage two industry-defining shifts at the same time: They need to transition from combustion engines to electric power while also making their products more autonomous. They’re out of their league. They’re used to building cars, which is all about hardware and finding efficiencies. They aren’t software companies. But software and the batteries are the most critical parts of an electric car. The car companies simply aren’t structured to manage these transitions. That’s good for companies like mine.
Q: In Munich, where you have partnered with BMW, you found a niche: first-mile autonomy for vehicles coming off the assembly line. How does that work?
Lee: In a traditional self-driving car, you put all the sensors and technology into the car. You allow the car to decide how and where it’s going to go. We took a different approach. When BMW makes a car, somebody has to drive that car to a ship. They have all these drivers, shuttling back and forth and back and forth, all day, every day. It’s incredibly inefficient. We installed sensors not in the cars, but throughout the facility. It’s a wireless system — a sort of mesh network — that automates the transition from the factory to the ship. It’s just one step in a very complicated process, but it’s saving BMW hundreds of millions of dollars.
Q: How far are we from fully autonomous vehicles?
They’re coming. When we get to the point when they are on public roads — and we will get there; it’s absolutely going to happen — everything we think we know about transportation will change. We still have a lot to do to prove out the technology, however. My company is focused on shorter-term projects — things we can do now and apply in different ways, with different companies, as we move forward. I’ll give you an example: We can already move cars around a manufacturing facility without needing drivers in them. Imagine that we do that with electric vehicles, and that we automate the chargers — the car pulls up, and a robotic arm swings out and charges the car. The time that would save, the resources you could redirect elsewhere in the facility — that could be a billion-dollar savings.