IPL (www.ipl.global) is a unique robot start-up company in Korea. The company got its start in March 2014 in the smart home market as a social robot item. Meaning Innovate Play lab, IPL seeks to revolutionize the concept of play. In excess of three years, the company has amassed knowledge in robot technology and the internet of things, machine learning technology and design, as well as user experience. By converging knowledge in these areas, the company has launched a new lifestyle robot service.

▲iJINI (Chinese: Domgy)

“iJINI (Chinese: Domgy) is the flagship product developed in-house by the company as a smart robot, developed for a “Smart Home + IoT service Hub Platform Service.” As a social robot, this product has become a hot item in the robot industry. iJINI is in the form of a lovable pet dog and, as such, is re-envisioning a future of robots being kept as pets in the home while also providing security, home automation, and pet/baby monitoring services.

iJINI’s dimensions are 224 (W) * 226 (H) * 273 mm (D) in size and weighs 2.1 kg. It can operate for 6 hours on a single charge. The five touch sensors, 4-inch screen and six LEDs help it to emotionally interact with people. It comes equipped with 1 Humidity + Temp Sensor, 1 Illuminance sensor, and 3 Position Sensitive Devices (Obstacles Detection, Drop Detection). Motion parameters are leg 40°, head pitch 60°, and head roll +/- 90 °. It also comes equipped with two speakers and six LED lighting lamps and supports communication standards such as WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee and IR. iJINI moves at a rate of 360 mm/s.

IPL has been developing their own technological innovation in all the areas of robotics (design, design, hardware, software, service development environment); in particular, they developed their own Android robotic operating system. In order to showcase the world’s LTE-based smart home robot service, they company has finalized development on an android-based robot module and OS and robot enivironment optimized to work with LTE.

At the end of last year, it signed a distribution contract with its Chinese partner Roobo. At a minimum guaranteed amount of 16 billion won, it is the highest contract price for a Korean robot company in a single exported service robot product.

Currently, with a labor force of over 60 people in the development arena who are preparing for global service, it is no wonder, then, that the company has been awarded the “2016 Red Dot Design Award Best winner of the industrial”, Overseas Series A investment (USD220,000); Shinbo’s “First Penguin Excellent Company”; top prize in the “2015 Next Startup Award”; “2015 Goyang Best in Innovations Award IT / SW”; and was ranked 1st in weekly ranking in January 2016, Demo Day (13,000 Startups). The smart home robot iJINI by IPL was developed to provide emotional exchanges as well as home and security services, and lifestyle services in an easy and quick manner by providing an environment conducive to this. At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2017 that opened in Barcelona, Spain this spring, the company was showcased as one of the “top 20 startups.” A company associate has said that the company is confident that crowd-funding efforts with a top crowd-funding company based in the US will go ahead as planned and that the company is looking forward to bringing its innovation to the global market in the near future.

IPL’s CEO Kim Kyung Wook revealed that, “We are actively engaged in forming partnerships and commercialization opportunities for not only the Korean market but overseas markets as well.” He continued, “IPL has worked tirelessly to create success not only in the Chinese market but in the global market, and we are confident that our efforts will lead us to grow into a global robot start-up.”

The vision that Mr. Kim has set for IPL is noteworthy: “Our ultimate goal as a company is to help people’s lives with our robotics technology as manifested in our hardware convergent service platform.”