Yeongwoo Son

Hello! I’m a Ph.D. student at the Robotics Innovatory, Sungkyunkwan University, under the supervision of Prof. Hyouk Ryeol Choi.

Alongside my Ph.D. studies, I work with AIDIN ROBOTICS on various projects in legged robotics.

My main research interests include autonomous navigation, path planning, learning-based motion planning, collision avoidance, perceptive locomotion, and legged robot systems.

Email  /  Github  /  Youtube  /  ORCID

profile photo

Research
Rotatable Area-Based Yaw-Aware Navigation for Large-Scale Multi-Layer Environments
Yeongwoo Son, Hansol Kang, Jiman Park, Seongwon Nam, Jaeyoung Oh, Bumsu Yi, Hyeonwoo Yu, Hyunyong Lee, Hyouk Ryeol Choi†
Submission planned for Robotics and Automation Practice (RA-P)
project page (TBD) / paper (TBD) / video (TBD)

An extended 3D RoA-Planner for practical, large-scale multi-layer environments, using Traversable Region Propagation, Narrow-Space-Adaptive Downsampling, and an offline RoA-Graph to enable easy deployment and efficient planning.

3D RoA-Planner: Path Planner for Quadruped Robots in Confined Spaces Using 3D Rotatable Areas
Yeongwoo Son, Hyunyong Lee, Hansol Kang, Jiman Park, Seongwon Nam, Jaeyoung Oh, Bumsu Yi, Hyeonwoo Yu, Hyouk Ryeol Choi†
Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2026
project page / paper / video

Path planner utilizing 3D Rotatable Area (3D RoA) to efficiently generate collision-free and traversable paths for quadruped robots in confined spaces.

RoA-Planner: Rotatable Area-based Path Planner in Dense Spaces
Yeongwoo Son, Hyunyong Lee, Hansol Kang, Jiman Park, Seongwon Nam, Jaeyoung Oh, Bumsu Yi, Junha Song, Sooyeon Choi, Bogeun Kim, Daegeun Song, Hyouk Ryeol Choi†
Transactions on Automation Science and Engieering (T-ASE), 2025, To be presented at ICRA 2026
project page / paper / video / poster / graphical abstract

Path planner using Rotatable Area (RoA), which represents a range of heading angles where the robot can rotate without colliding with obstacles.

Project
Perceptive Locomotion Framework
Yeongwoo Son, Bumsi Yi, Seongwon Nam, Jiman Park

πŸš€ PoC at POSCO Pohang Steelworks

Developed an optimization-based locomotion framework to enable stable stair climbing for quadruped robots, AiDIN-IX.

Competition
POSCO Industrial AI-Robot Challenge 2025
Yeongwoo Son, Hansol Kang, Jaeyoung Oh, Bumsu Yi, Daegeol Ko, Seongbo Ha, Jaehyuk Hur
project page / video1 / video2

πŸ₯‡ 1st Place

A competition, organized by POSCO, evaluating the autonomous walking and mission-performing capabilities of quadruped robots in an industrial site replicating the POSCO steelworks.