Uksang Yoo — accepted AI-conference papers

2026

DYMO-Hair: Generalizable Volumetric Dynamics Modeling for Robot Hair Manipulation

Chengyang Zhao, Uksang Yoo, Arkadeep Narayan Chaudhury, Giljoo Nam, Jonathan Francis, Jeffrey Ichnowski +1

ICRA 2026poster

Hair care is an essential daily activity, yet it remains inaccessible to individuals with limited mobility and challenging for autonomous robot systems due to the fine-grained physical structure and complex dynamics of hair. In this work, we present DYMO-Hair, a model-based robot hair care system. W…

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2026

Functional Force-Aware Retargeting from Virtual Human Demos to Soft Robot Policies

Uksang Yoo, Mengjia Zhu, Evan Pezent, Jom Preechayasomboon, Jean Oh, Jeffrey Ichnowski +5

RSS 2026poster

We introduce SoftAct, a framework for teaching soft robot hands to perform human-like manipulation skills by explicitly reasoning about contact forces. Leveraging immersive virtual reality, our system captures rich human demonstrations, including hand kinematics, object motion, dense contact patches…

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2025

KineSoft: Learning Proprioceptive Manipulation Policies with Soft Robot Hands

Uksang Yoo, Jonathan Francis, Jean Oh, Jeffrey Ichnowski

CoRL 2025oral

Underactuated soft robot hands offer inherent safety and adaptability advantages over rigid systems, but developing dexterous manipulation skills remains challenging. While imitation learning shows promise for complex manipulation tasks, traditional approaches struggle with soft systems due to demon…

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2025

Soft Robotic Dynamic in-Hand Pen Spinning

Yunchao Yao, Uksang Yoo, Jean Oh, Christopher G. Atkeson, Jeffrey Ichnowski

ICRA 2025

Dynamic in-hand manipulation remains challenging for soft robotic systems, which have demonstrated advantages in safe, compliant interactions but struggle with highspeed dynamic tasks. In this work, we present SWIFT, a system for learning dynamic tasks using a soft and compliant robotic hand. Unlike

Cited by 7 Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗

2025

SonicBoom: Contact Localization Using Array of Microphones

Moonyoung Lee, Uksang Yoo, Jean Oh, Jeffrey Ichnowski, George Kantor, Oliver Kroemer

RA-L 2025

In cluttered environments where visual sensors encounter heavy occlusion, such as in agricultural settings, tactile signals can provide crucial spatial information for the robot to locate rigid objects and maneuver around them. We introduce SonicBoom, a holistic hardware and learning pipeline that e

Cited by 6 Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗

2024

POE: Acoustic Soft Robotic Proprioception for Omnidirectional End-effectors

Uksang Yoo, Ziven Lopez, Jeffrey Ichnowski, Jean Oh

ICRA 2024poster

Shape estimation is crucial for precise control of soft robots. However, soft robot shape estimation and proprioception are challenging due to their complex deformation behaviors and infinite degrees of freedom. Their continuously deforming bodies complicate integrating rigid sensors and reliably es…

Cited by 9 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2023

Toward Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Transfer Learning for Pneumatic Soft Robot 3D Proprioceptive Sensing

Uksang Yoo, Hanwen Zhao, Alvaro Altamirano, Wenzhen Yuan, Chen Feng

ICRA 2023poster

Pneumatic soft robots present many advantages in manipulation tasks. Notably, their inherent compliance makes them safe and reliable in unstructured and fragile environments. However, full-body shape sensing for pneumatic soft robots is challenging because of their high degrees of freedom and comple…

Cited by 18 Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗

2021

Analytical Design of a Pneumatic Elastomer Robot With Deterministically Adjusted Stiffness

Uksang Yoo, Yang Liu, Ashish D. Deshpande, Farshid Alambeigi

RA-L 2021

This paper presents a novel Pneumatic Elastomer Robot (PER), called Deterministically Adjusted Stiffness-Pneumatic Elasotmer Robot (DAS-PER), that can concurrently display preprogrammed elongation and bending behaviors. Our design methodology integrates a comprehensive analytical modeling and additi

Cited by 11 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2020

Toward Analytical Modeling and Evaluation of Curvature-Dependent Distributed Friction Force in Tendon-Driven Continuum Manipulators

Yang Liu, Seong Hyo Ahn, Uksang Yoo, Alexander R. Cohen, Farshid Alambeigi

IROS 2020poster

In this paper, we present an analytical modeling approach to address the problem of tension loss in a generic variable curvature tendon-driven continuum manipulators (TD-CM) occurring due to the tendon-sheath distributed friction force. Despite the previous approaches in the literature, our presente…

Cited by 9 Source ↗Scholar ↗