Mar 4, 2026
ACEWORKS Invites Defense Experts to Share Autonomous Driving and HILS Technologies
ACEWORKS (CEO Seung-beom Park), South Korea's leading specialist in autonomous driving and electronic control solutions, is turning heads with a new initiative: bringing together the country's top maritime security experts to explore how its technologies could serve the defense sector.
On the 20th of last month, ACEWORKS hosted the Defense Autonomous Driving & Unmanned Technology Exchange at its headquarters in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. The gathering drew a distinguished lineup of defense figures, including Prof. Seok-jong Boo of Hanyang University's Department of Defense Intelligent Information and Convergence Engineering (former Chief of Naval Operations and Ambassador-designate to Türkiye), Seong-bae Park, former Commander of the ROK Navy Logistics Command, and Ki-nam Lee, a fellow at the 21st Century Military Research Institute.
The session was organized to examine whether ACEWORKS' field-proven autonomous driving and electronic control technologies could bring meaningful innovation to the development and verification of defense unmanned systems.
The full ACEWORKS leadership team was present, including CEO Seung-beom Park, Advisor Myung-ho Sunwoo, Yang-ho Kim (Head of Embedded Systems), Kang-yoon Lee (Head of Strategic Planning), and Won-taek Lim (Head of the SDV Division). Together with the defense guests, they discussed how the company's technology could be applied to accelerate the advancement of unmanned defense platforms and identified potential areas for collaboration.
ACEWORKS centered its presentation on two of the most pressing challenges in defense unmanned systems: reliability assurance and verification efficiency. The team demonstrated how its HILS (Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation)-based virtual verification environment enables repeated testing of diverse operational scenarios with actual hardware in the loop — and how the verification framework can be reconfigured on the fly as requirements evolve. The approach, they argued, helps identify development risks early, cuts testing costs and timelines, and raises overall system maturity.
Live demonstrations covered a range of key technologies: engine controllers for defense systems, HILS equipment configurations, core unmanned actuation components — including steering, braking, and acceleration actuators — and autonomous driving algorithms with sensor fusion capabilities.
"If ACEWORKS' autonomous driving platform, already proven in the commercial sector, is applied to defense, it could meaningfully advance the autonomy of maritime unmanned vessels," said Prof. Boo. "Virtual simulation-based verification, in particular, has real potential as a cornerstone of the Smart Navy vision — delivering both time and cost efficiencies that defense programs badly need."
CEO Park echoed the sentiment: "ACEWORKS has built deep expertise in integrating autonomous driving, electronic control, and verification technologies into solutions that work in the real world. We intend to put that experience to work in the defense domain — improving the development efficiency and operational safety of unmanned systems — and we look forward to deepening our collaboration with defense experts as we move forward." (End)