Hi! My name is Sunghwan Kimpronounced "Sung-Hwahn" (su as in "sun"). I also go by Shawn. I am a PhD student at UC San Diego, working at Existential Robotics Laboratory. I'm fortunate to be advised by Prof. Nikolay Atanasov. I'm also closely working with Prof. Yulun Tian at University of Michigan. Previously, I was a research officer at the Agency for Defense Development (ADD), the South Korean counterpart to the U.S. DARPA. I received my B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics (double major) at KAIST.
My research goal is to enable mobile robots to perform long-horizon complex tasks in large-scale environments autonomously. To this end, I am interested in building structured state representations that capture the physical world and applying them to robot task planning. My current focus includes neural scene representations, neural SLAM, and robot policy learning methods (e.g., VLA, model-based RL).
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