KAIST RaiLab
KAIST mechanical engineering lab of Prof. Jemin Hwangbo that builds the RAIBO quadrupeds; RAIBO 2 ran a full 42.195 km marathon on one charge.
RaiLab is a legged-robotics research laboratory at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) in Daejeon, South Korea, led by Professor Jemin Hwangbo of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Its members page lists one professor, 13 doctoral students and 10 master's students. The lab designs its own robots end to end, including the mechanical structure, the drive units (reducers, motors, encoders and motor drivers) and the power and motor-driver electronics, which it lays out, assembles and tests in house. It then trains their controllers with reinforcement learning in simulation.
Robots. The lab's own platforms are:
- RAIBO, a mid-sized quadruped with 12 motors and high-frequency motor control, intended for inspection, exploration and patrol. It was used for the 2023 Science Robotics paper on learning quadrupedal locomotion on deformable terrain, in which the robot ran on a sandy beach.
- RAIBO 2, a quadruped built for long-term use in harsh environments, designed to be easy to service and manufacture. The lab gives a mass of 42 kg, a top speed of up to 6 m/s and up to 8 hours of continuous operation, using modular hollow-shaft actuators. In November 2024 RAIBO 2 completed the full 42.195 km course of the Sangju Dried Persimmon Marathon without recharging or a battery swap, finishing in 4 h 19 min 52 s at an average 2.64 m/s on slopes of up to 18.4 degrees. It used about 1,280 Wh of a 1,930 Wh battery. The work, which combines reduced leg mass and joint friction, efficient actuators and circuits, regenerative braking on descents and learned gait control, was published in Nature in September 2026. The team gives a total cost of transport of 0.248 and an estimated range of about 65 km per charge.
- RAIWAY, a two-wheeled-legged robot with off-road wheels and reinforcement-learning control for fast travel over rough terrain.
- RAICART, an Ackermann-steered wheeled platform (770 x 500 x 480 mm, 14 kg, NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier onboard) used for outdoor navigation research such as the Crop-LSTM vehicle-dynamics model.
The lab also uses the MIT-designed Mini Cheetah (built by Naver Labs) for high-speed learned locomotion on asphalt, slippery ground and slopes.
Research. Published topics include constrained reinforcement learning for legged locomotion (IEEE T-RO 2024), RobotSketch for legged-robot design with 3D sketching and VR review (SIGGRAPH 2024), whole-body manipulation of large objects by a quadruped (RA-L 2024), imitating and fine-tuning MPC (RA-L 2023), concurrent training of a control policy and state estimator (RA-L 2022) and learned forward-dynamics models for safe quadruped navigation (RSS 2022). Earlier work by Hwangbo covers contact-dynamics solvers (per-contact iteration, RA-L 2018) and cable-driven actuation (IROS 2018). The lab's software page points to RaiSim, a rigid-body physics engine for robot simulation that depends only on STL and Eigen and is distributed by RaiSim Tech Inc.
Commercialisation. Hwangbo is CEO of the faculty spin-off Raion Robotics, which took seed investment from Company K Partners and FuturePlay in 2024 to commercialise RAIBO 2 for defence, construction and logistics. RAIBO 2 won the grand prize at the 2023 Challenge! K-Startup competition.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
RAIBO 2
Long-endurance research quadruped with modular hollow-shaft actuators; ran a full 42.195 km marathon on one charge in Nov 2024 (published in Nature, 2026).
RAIBO
Mid-sized 12-motor quadruped for inspection, exploration and patrol research; demonstrated learned running on sand, hills and stairs (Science Robotics 2023).
RAIWAY
Two-wheeled-legged robot with off-road wheels and reinforcement-learning control for fast travel over rough terrain.
RAICART
In-house Ackermann-steered wheeled platform for outdoor navigation research on unpaved terrain; all computing and data logging onboard.
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Contact KAIST RaiLab
WEBSITE
https://railab.kaist.ac.krHEADQUARTERS
Korea, Republic of (South)
Company Facts
Founded
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Primary Role
Research Institute
Company Size
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Primary Region
Asia-Pacific
Annual Sales
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Funding Stage
Grant / Non-profit
Funding Total
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