From the outside, the building resembles a 28-story robot hive—an anonymous box of metal and vents. And that’s exactly what it is.
Dubbed 1784, this is the new headquarters for Naver Labs, opening in June. Owned by Naver, which you might consider the Google of South Korea, it’s “the world’s first robot-friendly building,” according to the company.
Architected by Samsung subsidiary Samoo, it’s a space designed to test the boundaries of the future of automation, where 100 wheeled robots will soon work alongside 5,000 people, ferrying packages, lunches, and Starbucks coffee to their human counterparts. These robots aren’t just a gimmick, but an extension of the building architecture itself, serving as a way to give the building hands today while it learns how to take care of itself tomorrow.
“We just wanted to build a normal office building,” Seok says. But as the company considered its role in the future, its vision grew more ambitious. Naver is the leading search engine in South Korea, but much like the U.S.’s own tech companies, that’s only a sliver of its services: Like Amazon, Naver sells products and operates a sizable cloud business. Like Microsoft, it researches AI and robotics. Oh, and Naver also runs a messaging app, social media platform, and comic book service on top of its burgeoning robot business.
But the most important part of those products may very well be the robot itself. Named Rookie, it’s a robot purpose-built by Naver for this building, as the company has been creating many of the foundational technologies and designing the UX to bring the vision to life. And at 1784, their function is designed to weave into the architecture.
“[Robots] weren’t Naver’s business at all in the beginning . . . but we thought perhaps it could be a new type of business unto itself,” Seok says, alluding to the opportunities in an industry poised to reach $116 billion by 2030.
A building for robots, inspired by people with disabilities
The defining motifs of 1784 can be seen in their spartan fit and finish. Steel and concrete dominate the space to invoke the sensation of futurism, which is warmed with occasional wood floors and the incorporation of greenery.
Coincidentally, many of Naver’s concerns for how robots might traverse the space without falling over were already solved with design for wheelchair accessibility. That means the building never requires Rookie to take the stairs, features wide halls, and avoids hard slopes or single steps.
[Image: Naver]
A very smart, dumb robot design
As Seok explains, we imagine most robots as self-contained, intelligent devices with their own processors and navigational tools, much how autonomous Waymo cars use lidar to map streets in 3D. But Naver’s robots are “brainless,” and make their way through 1784 primarily using a normal video camera.
How is this possible? Because Naver has moved the vast majority of each robot’s processing to servers. Using the building’s own internal 5G network, which Naver was able to deploy only with special permission from the government, Naver servers guide robots through the building with less latency than Wi-Fi.
To help the robots navigate, Naver servers hold a “digital twin,” or a 3D scan of the rooms and hallways inside 1784. By cross-referencing the twin with the robot’s own camera feed, the system can place robots with 6-inch accuracy at any given moment.
But Rookie isn’t simply an engineering challenge for the company: The soft touch points of these robots matters, too. Rookie has eyes that gaze in the direction it’s going, so that people can better read its intent. It also emanates a low artificial whir as it drives so that people can hear it coming.
“As a person working in this building, I can feel that it’s not just about the robots, but the people—and the robots and services are meant for the people,” Seok says. “The whole dynamic of the human-robot interaction is very cute. [Rookie is] smiling at you . . . rather than feeling cold in context, it does feel pretty fun.”
Meanwhile, for its next act, Naver is developing new robots that can monitor the Naver cloud. They will be designed to lift these computers in racks and handle many of the day-to-day operations of managing servers.
“It is quite funny because, as you know, the robot’s brain is in essence there in the server,” Seok says, “and so the robot is looking after its own brain.”
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