Sunghwan Kim (김성환)

Hi! My name is Sunghwan Kimpronounced "Sung-Hwahn" (su as in "sun"). I also go by Shawn. I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego, where I work with the 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 autonomously perform long-horizon, complex tasks involving navigation and physical interaction in large-scale environments. To this end, I aim to develop structured state representations of the physical world and leverage them for robot task planning and policy learning. My current research focuses on neural scene representations, neural SLAM, and robot learning methods for mobile manipulation, including vision-language-action models and model-based reinforcement learning.

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