I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Energy Engineering and Institute for Energy AI at KENTECH. Before joining KENTECH, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Bot Intelligence Group, Robotics Institute, CMU with Prof. Jean Oh. I obtained my Ph.D. and M.S. at KAIST, advised by Professor In So Kweon. I am a recipient of the Best Student Paper Award from WACV 2023, 29th Samsung Humantech Paper Award, 1st Place Award at 2024 CVPR WAD workshop, and Best Poster Award at 2025 ICRA TIRO workshop. Also, I co-organized “Thermal Infrared in Robotics” workshop in ICRA 2025 and “Multi-spectral Imaging for Robotics and Automation” workshop in ICCV 2025.

My research focuses on developing a robust physical AI that can perceive, understand, and navigate the dynamic world in challenging conditions, with a specific interest in spatial/semantic perception in extreme conditions, self-supervised learning, deep reinforcement learning, multi-sensor fusion, and vision-language navigation/manipulation. I am interested in the following areas, but also open to other explorable/challenging domains.

  • Unsupervised and Self-supervised 3D Geometry (depth, optical flow, odometry, SLAM)
  • 3D Geometry in Challenging Conditions (rainy, snowy, over-exposed, low-lighted, etc)
  • Learning Representation from Multi-modal Sensor and Self-supervision
  • Physical AI and Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robot/Sensor (legged robot, humanoid, camera)
  • Vision-Language Navigation/Manipulation
Please refer to the following link for more information:
[Link to RoBustLab]

Contact

  • shinwc159 [at] gmail.com

    ushin [at] kentech.ac.kr

  • KENTECH, 21 KENTECH-gil, Naju-si, Jeonnam 58330, Republic of Korea

Education

  • Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, KAIST, 2023

    Advisor: Prof. In So Kweon

  • M.S. in Electrical Engineering, KAIST, 2019

    Advisor: Prof. In So Kweon

  • B.S. in Electrical and Information Engineering, SNUST, 2017

    Advisor: Prof. Byoung Wook Choi

Research Experiences

  • Korea Institute of Energy Technology, Jeonnam, Korea
    Aug. 2025 - Present

    Assistant Professor, School of Energy Engineering / Institute for Energy AI.
    Principal Investigator, Robust Physical AI & Robotics (RoBust) Lab.
  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States
    Aug. 2023 - Aug. 2025

    Postdoctoral Fellow (Postdoc), Bot Intelligence Group (Advisor: Jean Oh).
  • Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea
    Sep. 2019 - Aug. 2023

    Research Assistant (Ph.D.), Robotics and Computer Vision Lab (Advisor: In So Kweon).
    Research topics : Self-supervised learning, 3D Geometry, Thermal camera, Reinforcement Learning.
  • Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea
    Sep. 2017 - Aug. 2019

    Research Assistant (M.S.), Robotics and Computer Vision Lab (Advisor: In So Kweon).
    Research topics : Camera Exposure Control, Low-level Vision, 3D Geometry.
  • Seoul National University of Science and Technology, Seoul, Korea
    Mar. 2015 - Jun. 2017

    Research Intern, Embedded System Lab (Advisor: Byoung Wook Choi).
    Research topics : Embedded Linux, Real-time Operating System, Real-time Ethernet Protocol.

Publications

  • All-day Depth Completion via Thermal-LiDAR Fusion

    Janghyun Kim, Minseong Kweon, Jinsun Park*, Ukcheol Shin* (*Equal Corresponding)

    Under-review, 2025

    Short version at 'Thermal Infrared in Robotics' workshop @ ICRA 2025

    [ paper / code ]

  • Deep Depth Estimation from Thermal Image: Dataset, Benchmark, and Challenges

    Ukcheol Shin, Jinsun Park

    Under-review, 2025

    [ paper / code ]

  • SF-VO: Self-Supervised Few-Shot Adaptation for Visual Odometry

    Junhee Lee, Jean Oh, Ukcheol Shin*, Kyungdon Joo* (*Equal Corresponding)

    Under-review, 2025

    [ paper / code ]

  • VPOcc: Exploiting Vanishing Point for Monocular 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction

    Junsu Kim, Junhee Lee, Ukcheol Shin, Jean Oh, Kyungdon Joo

    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2025 Oral

    Short version at 'Foundation Models for V2X-based Cooperative Autonomous Driving' workshop @ CVPR 2025

    [ paper / project / code ]

  • Bridging Spectral-wise and Multi-spectral Depth Estimation via Geometry-guided Contrastive Learning

    Ukcheol Shin, Kyunghyun Lee, and Jean Oh

    IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025 Oral

    [ paper / code ]

  • Flow4D: Leveraging 4D Voxel Network for LiDAR Scene Flow Estimatoin

    Jaeyeul Kim*, Jungwan Woo*, Ukcheol Shin, Jean Oh, and Sunghoon Im (*Equal Contribution)

    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2025

    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2025 Oral

    1st Place Award, CVPR 2024 Autonomous Driving Workshop 'Argoverse Scene Flow Challenge'

    [ paper / code ]

  • FIReStereo: Forest InfraRed Stereo Dataset for UAS Depth Perception in Visually Degraded Environments

    Devansh Dhrafan*, Yifei Liu*, Andrew Jong, Ukcheol Shin, Yao He, Tyler Harp, Yaoyu Hu, Jean Oh, Sebastian Scherer (*Equal Contribution)

    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2025

    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2025 Oral

    [ paper / project / code ]

  • Exploiting Cross-modal Cost Volume for Multi-sensor Depth Estimation

    Janghyun Kim, Ukcheol Shin, Seokyong Heo, Jinsun Park

    Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 2024

    [ paper ]

  • Density-aware Domain Generalization for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

    Jaeyeul Kim*, Jungwan Woo*, Ukcheol Shin, Jean Oh, and Sunghoon Im (*Equal Contribution)

    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024 Oral

    [ paper ]

  • Learning to Control Camera Exposure via Reinforcement Learning

    Kyunghyun Lee*, Ukcheol Shin*, Byeong-Uk Lee (* equal contribution)

    Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), 2024

    [ paper / project ]

  • Learning Quadrupedal Locomotion with Impaired Joints Using Random Joint Masking

    Mincheol Kim, Ukcheol Shin, Jung-Yup Kim

    IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024 Oral

    Media coverage: covered by IEEE Spectrum

    [ paper / project ]

  • Complementary Random Masking for RGB-T Semantic Segmentation

    Ukcheol Shin, Kyunghyun Lee, In So Kweon, Jean Oh

    IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024 Oral

    [ paper / code / project ]

  • Stable Surface Regularization for Fast Few-Shot NeRF

    ByeongIn Joung, Byeong-Uk Lee, Jaesung Choe, Ukcheol Shin, Minjun Kang, Taeyeop Lee, In-So Kweon, Kuk-Jin Yoon

    International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), 2024

    [ paper ]

  • Joint Self-supervised Learning and Adversarial Adaptation for Monocular Depth Estimation from Thermal Image

    Ukcheol Shin, Kwanyong Park, Kyunghyun Lee, Byeong-Uk Lee, In So Kweon

    Machine Vision and Applications (MVA), 2023

    [ paper / code ]

  • Deep Depth Estimation from Thermal Image

    Ukcheol Shin, Jinsun Park, In So Kweon

    Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), 2023

    [ paper / Benchmark / MS2 dataset / Github ]

  • Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation from Thermal Images via Adversarial Multi-spectral Adaptation

    Ukcheol Shin, Kwanyong Park, Byeong-Uk Lee, Kyunghyun Lee, In So Kweon

    IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023 Oral

    Best Student Paper Award, Out of 641 accepted papers (out of 1577 submissions)

    [ paper / code / poster / award ]

  • Maximizing Self-supervision from Thermal Image for Effective Self-supervised Learning of Depth and Ego-motion

    Ukcheol Shin, Kyunghyun Lee, Byeong-Uk Lee, In So Kweon

    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2022

    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2022 Oral

    [ paper / code / project ]

  • DRL-ISP: Multi-Objective Camera ISP with Deep Reinforcement Learning

    Ukcheol Shin*, Kyunghyun Lee*, In So Kweon (* equal contribution)

    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2022 Oral

    [ paper / code / project ]

  • UDA-COPE: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Category-level Object Pose Estimation

    Taeyeop Lee, Byeong-Uk Lee, Inkyu Shin, Jaesung Choe, Ukcheol Shin, In So Kweon, Kuk-Jin Yoon

    Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), 2022

    [ paper / project ]

  • Self-supervised Depth and Ego-motion Estimation for Monocular Thermal Video using Multi-spectral Consistency Loss

    Ukcheol Shin, Kyunghyun Lee, Seokju Lee, In So Kweon

    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2021

    IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022 Oral

    [ paper / code / project ]

  • MS-UDA: Multi-Spectral Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Thermal Image Semantic Segmentation

    YeongHyeon Kim, Ukcheol Shin, Jinsun Park, In So Kweon

    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2021

    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2021 Oral

    [ paper / code / project ]

  • An Efficient Asynchronous Method for Integrating Evolutionary and Gradient-based Policy Search

    Kyunghyun Lee, Byeong-Uk Lee, Ukcheol Shin, In So Kweon

    Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2020 Oral (Acceptance: 105/9454 ≈ 1.1%)

    [ paper / code ]

  • Vehicular multi-camera sensor system for automated visual inspection of electric power distribution equipment

    Jinsun Park, Ukcheol Shin, Gyumin Shim, Kyungdon Joo, Francois Rameau, Junhyeok Kim, Dong-Geol Choi, In So Kweon

    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2019 Oral

    Media coverage: covered by MBN, EnergyDaily, and many local media

    [ paper ]

  • Camera exposure control for robust robot vision with noise-aware image quality assessment

    Ukcheol Shin, Jinsun Park, Gyumin Shim, Francois Rameau, In So Kweon

    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2019 Oral

    [ paper / dataset / code / project ]

  • Performance evaluation of real-time mechanisms on open embedded hardware platforms

    Ukcheol Shin, Byoung Wook Choi

    Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems, 2017

    [ paper ]

  • Development and control of an omnidirectional mobile robot on an ethercat network

    Raimarius Delgado, UkCheol Shin, Chang Hwi Hong, Byoung Wook Choi

    International Journal of Applied Engineering Research, 2016

    [ paper ]

Awards & Honors

  • Outstanding Reviewer Award, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), May 2025
  • Best Poster Award, 'Thermal Infrared in Robotics' workshop @ ICRA 2025, May 2025
  • 1st Place Award, Autonomous Driving Workshop 'Argoverse Scene Flow Challenge' @ CVPR 2024, June 2024
  • Honorable Mention, 29th HumanTech Paper Award, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Feb. 2023 ($2,000)
  • Best Student Paper Award, IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), Jan. 2023
  • Graduation with Honors (Top 3%), SNUST in Electrical and Information Engineering, Feb. 2017
  • Honorable Mention, All-semester Design Based Learning (ADBL) Capstone Contest, June 2016
  • Second Prize, Robot Open Academy, Feb. 2016
  • Grand Prize, All-semester Design Based Learning (ADBL) Capstone Contest, Dec. 2015
  • Military Service, Army Sergeant, Honorable discharge, Feb. 2013 - Nov. 2014
  • Scholarship for Academic Excellence, Scholarship for the entire B.S. program (2011-2012, 2015-2016)

Academic Activities

Journal Reviewer

  • IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics (T-CYB)(2022)
  • IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles (T-IV)(2023-2024)
  • IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (T-ITS)(2025)
  • IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) (2022-2025)
  • IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning System (T-NNLS)(2024-2025)
  • ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (T-OMM)(2024)
  • Neural Processing Letters (2023)
  • Pattern Recognition (PR) (2023)

Conference Reviewer

  • IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (2022-Now)
  • IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) (2021,2023,2025)
  • European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) (2024)
  • IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) (2023)
  • IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (2024-Now)
  • Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) (2024-Now)
  • Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) (2021-Now)
  • International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) (2022-Now)
  • International Conference on Learning Representations(ICLR) (2022-Now)
  • AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (2021-Now)

Program Committee

Invited Talks

  • ACCV 2024 Workshop on 'Multispectral Imaging for Robotics and Automation', Nov. 2024
  • KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), Sep. 2024
  • Hanyang University, May 2024
  • SNU (Seoul National University), Feb. 2024
  • GIST (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology), Sep. 2023
  • UNIST (Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology), July 2023
  • Pusan National University, July 2023