Korea University mechanical engineering lab led by Prof. Joonbum Bae: avatar robots, soft wearable haptic interfaces and shared-autonomy teleoperation.
The Bio-Robotics and Control (BiRC) Lab is a robotics research group in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Korea University in Seoul. It is directed by Prof. Joonbum Bae, and its website reports 91 international journal publications. The lab frames its work as Co-Embodied Intelligence: the idea that humans and robots can share a common physical intelligence, so that motion, contact, force and intent learned in one body can transfer to another. Research is organised into three areas: humanoid and avatar robotics, soft and wearable interfaces, and embodied learning with shared autonomy.
The lab's featured robot platform is a whole-body avatar robot. It was developed by Team UNIST, led by Bae during his time at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, for the ANA Avatar XPRIZE. According to the team's published paper, the system pairs a human-like upper body, a five-fingered hand and an omnidirectional base with four mecanum wheels, and the operator wears a head-mounted display, a wearable haptic interface and a foot haptic controller. Team UNIST scored 13.5 of 15 points in the finals and placed sixth among 17 finalists. The lab's pages also show gravity-compensation mechanisms and earlier bio-inspired water-striding, swimming and flying robots.
On the human side, the soft and wearable interface work covers a soft electroosmotic pump, a whole-body sensor suit with minimal wiring, liquid-metal soft sensors, a hybrid gripper, hand exoskeletons and sensing gloves for virtual-reality use. The learning area shows human-in-the-loop avatar teleoperation, thermo-haptic feedback and augmented-reality-assisted interaction, together with imitation learning, visuo-tactile policies and cross-embodiment retargeting. The lab is located in Innovation Hall on the Anam campus, 145 Anam-ro, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul.
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