A research team led by Yoo Ji-hwan, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), has won a best paper award from a world-renowned robotics journal for the second consecutive year.
KAIST said Tuesday that Yoo's team received the award from "IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)," an academic journal operated by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in the United States. The RA-L Best Paper Award is given each year to only a small number of outstanding papers, selected through a comprehensive evaluation of academic contribution, technical originality, and experimental completeness among published robotics papers. Yoo's team's paper was included among the five best papers out of more than 1,700 papers published in IEEE RA-L last year.
Yoo's research team proposed a Self-Wearable Adaptive Garment (SWAG) system in the paper. It applies the pneumatic-based soft growing robot principle the team has accumulated to a clothing structure. The principle uses air pressure and other methods to enable a structure to deploy itself and move as if growing, much like a flexible robot. The research was led by Kim Nam-gyun, a researcher at KAIST, with participation from the research group of Allison Okamura, a professor at Stanford University in the United States.
"We verified prototypes of various clothing forms, including sleeves, jackets, and pants, through experiments," Yoo said. "This is significant in that the principle of soft growing robots has expanded into human daily life."
