Hyundai Wia to Supply 4-Ton Fully Unmanned Forklift to Kia's Hwaseong Plant

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On September 7, Hyundai Wia confirmed that it will supply fully unmanned forklifts to Kia's AutoLand Hwaseong Plant, with the equipment scheduled to begin operation in actual manufacturing sites starting May 2027. The equipment can perform autonomous in-plant movement, palletized cargo handling, and truck loading/unloading operations without a driver, with a maximum load capacity of 4 tons and a top operating speed of approximately 6.5 km/h. Hyundai Wia stated that this marks the first time in South Korea that forklifts capable of fully unmanned loading and unloading operations have been deployed at a manufacturing site.

The unmanned forklift is equipped with LiDAR, vision sensors, and four-sided safety scanners for in-plant positioning, obstacle detection, and work-area safety monitoring. Hyundai Wia maps the actual plant environment into a digital twin system, allowing the equipment to generate autonomous travel routes based on the virtual environment and adjust movement paths according to on-site changes. The four-sided safety scanners can trigger a vehicle stop upon detecting personnel or obstacles.

The equipment's loading system uses vision sensors to identify pallet positions and incorporates the ICP (Iterative Closest Point) algorithm to continuously correct target position data. Even when the pallet deviates up to 250 mm from the set position or rotates more than 10 degrees in the left-right direction, the system can still recognize the pallet and perform the fork insertion operation. The vehicle can also automatically adjust its forklift posture in response to changes in truck body height during loading/unloading, ground conditions, and the slope of container entry/exit points.

Hyundai Wia has previously mass-produced Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) and has unified unmanned forklifts, AMRs, and parking robots under its H-Motion industrial mobile robot product line. This latest milestone marks the first time an unmanned forklift has been confirmed to enter Kia's actual vehicle manufacturing base, with the initial deployment site set for AutoLand Hwaseong, scheduled to begin in May 2027.