Hyeongkeun 'Hugo' Kim

Hyeongkeun 'Hugo' Kim

A MechEng student, who loves biology, robotics, and merging them for the better. An ASoIAF fan, and an ML hobbyist.

Robotics Group, NAVER LABS Corp.

Robotics Group, NAVER Labs, NAVER Corp. (Currently NAVER LABS Corp.)
Full-time Research Intern (Supervisor: Sangok Seok, Ph. D.), August 2016 ~ February 2017

NAVER LABS 2nd Super Interns!

During 2016 Fall, I was a full-time research intern at NAVER LABS Robotics Group, led by Dr. Sangok Seok. During the internship, we assisted the senior researchers in the Robotics group, such as designing structural components of Autonomous Personal Transporter. Additionally, the interns were given a team project(mentioned below) with the strong support from senior researchers and the group leader.

TuskBot: A Universal Stair-Climbing Wheeled Robot for Indoor Service Robots

Achieving universal mobility in general indoor settings with the wheeled robot was given as an intern team project. In other words, the robot should climb staircases regardless of its dimension and structure.

While track-based robots could be used to climb stairs, its structure caused damages on the floor, making it unsuitable for indoor use. TuskBot, a robot platform inspired by tusk of rhinos and elephants, successfully climbed any given stairs(that satisfy National Building Codes) with only wheels.

Designed for simplicity, the platform requires only 4 wheels and a simple structural component(‘Tusk’), contrary to conventional platforms (e.g. SHRIMP, Rocker-Bogie).

In the intern team, I led the analysis for the optimization of the TuskBot structure and prepared the manuscript for publications.

The result had been published in IROS 2017, featured in DEVIEW 2017, received extensive domestic media coverage (Chosun-ilbo, SBS-CNBC, ZDNet Korea and so on), and a national patent was granted for this work.

Publications

  • D. Choi, M. Kim, H. Kim, J. Choe, M. C. Nah, “Motion Planning of Autonomous Personal Transporter Using Model Predictive Control for Minimizing Non-Minimum Phase Behavior” in 15th International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR 2018), Honolulu, USA, 2018 (Best Application Paper Award)

  • J. Choe, U. Kwon, M. C. Nah and H. Kim, “‘Design Analysis of TuskBot: Universal Stair Climbing 4-Wheel Indoor Robot” in 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Vancouver, 2017, pp. 6908-6914. (Corresponding Author, Co-first Author) [Link]

  • J. Choe, M. C. Nah, H. Kim and U. Kwon, “‘TuskBot’: Design of the Mobile Stair Climbing 2 By 2 Wheels Robot Platform with Novel Passive Structure ‘Tusk’” Proc. 2017 3rd International Conference on Control, Automation and Robotics (ICCAR). IEEE, Apr. 2017, pp. 217-220, (Co-First Author) [Link]

  • U. Kwon, H. Kim, M. C. Nah and J. Choe, “Rocker-Bogie with ‘Tusk’: Design of the mobile robot platform that can climb stairs with Tusk and rocker-bogie mechanism” in 12nd Korea Robotics Society Annual Conference, Pyeongchang, Rep. of Korea, 2017

Patents

  • U. Kwon, H. Kim, M. C. Nah, J. Choe, S. Seok, “ROBOT APPARATUS FOR CLIMBING STAIRS”, Republic of Korea Patent No. 10-2068239, Jan. 14, 2020. [Link]

Updated: