Autonomy and Perceptual Robotics Lab (APRL)

Dept. of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering
DGIST (Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology)

• Autonomy and Perceptual Robotics Lab (APRL, 로봇인식 및 자율화 연구실) at DGIST has been started in Dec 2024 by Giseop Kim. 

• Our Mission: APRL explores challenges in autonomous navigation and constructing world models for intelligent robots.

Latest News

• (Feb. 2026) Giseop Kim has been selected as an early-career researcher for KRoC 2026 (The 21st Korea Robotics Conference). He will present his recent work on memory-augmented spatial intelligence for long-term autonomous robot navigation.

• (Oct, 2025) Jiseon received the Best Poster Award at the HEAI Workshop of IROS 2025 — congratulations!

• (Oct, 2025) Excited to welcome Dr. Nayak — formerly a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. CheolGi Kim’s lab at DGIST’s Department of Physics and Chemistry — who joins our lab through the InnoCORE project to pioneer Magnetic SLAM research.

• (Sep, 2025) Giseop contributed to Chapter 8: LiDAR SLAM of the SLAM Handbook (From Localization and Mapping to Spatial Intelligence), which has now been released online!

• (Sep, 2025) The Robotics and Mechatronics Research Institute of DGIST has been selected for the Ministry of Education's Glocal Lab (University-Focused Research Institute) program. Our lab will be conducting research on sensor fusion, robot perception, and cognitive AI for augmented human robots (transhuman).

• (Jul, 2025) APRL has been selected for the DGIST Creative Challenging Research (N-HRHR) Program, supporting high-risk, high-return research in Physical AI and robotics.

• (Jun. 2025) DGIST has been selected for Korea’s InnoCORE initiative on Bio-Embodied Physical AI — our lab, as part of the DGIST team, is recruiting talented postdocs in SLAM, 3D vision, and vision-language navigation. 

• (May. 2025) Our lab is supported by the fund, AI Star Fellowship, from Ministry of Science and ICT for next six years (2025-2030).

• (Dec. 2024) Autonomy and Perceptual Robotics Lab (APRL) at DGIST has been started in Dec 2024 by Giseop Kim.