Busan-based Physical AI platform company Freegrow (CEO Kim Young-sik) announced on the 10th that it has been selected for the “2026 Regional Innovation Scale-Up Program,” jointly run by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Innovation Cluster Foundation.
The project period runs approximately 21 months, through December 2027.
Through this program, Freegrow plans to replace the vehicle-tracking system currently used at a major domestic finished-vehicle logistics site with its own domestically developed technology.
Until now, this type of system has relied heavily on imported equipment from the U.S. and Europe.
Conventional imported systems require an expensive, battery-powered tag on every vehicle, creating a significant upfront deployment cost.
They also have a limitation: when signal interference occurs in metal-shielded environments, the system depends on processing through an external server.
Freegrow’s technology, by contrast, is equipped with on-device AI that identifies and corrects radio interference patterns directly on the device, without routing through a server.
It also introduces a battery-free passive RFID method, designed to cut deployment costs — based on per-tag pricing — by roughly 90% compared to imported alternatives.
The company also independently developed technology to track vehicle location seamlessly across mixed indoor-outdoor environments.
The company said that as manufacturing automation continues to advance, environments dense with metal structures and moving equipment are expected to become even more common, making this approach increasingly relevant.
The target site for this program is a vehicle yard that stores several thousand new vehicles at a time. With indoor work areas and outdoor storage yards intermixed, the site suffers from severe GPS signal loss and radio interference from metal structures — conditions that even existing imported solutions have struggled to fully address.
Freegrow validated the field applicability of its technology through a 2025 pilot at a major domestic finished-vehicle logistics company’s vehicle yard, and plans to advance the system to a commercial-ready level through this new program.
Freegrow is a Busan-based Physical AI platform company founded in 2019, focused on advanced manufacturing.
The company holds 7 registered patents and 5 pending applications, and has completed more than 40 field validations.