Ewha Computer Science Major Team Wins 3rd Place at IEEE ICRA 2024 World Robot Competition
- Date2024.06.04
- 21240
Undergraduate Team Gained Recognition as the Only Female Robotics Engineers Team
A team of students majoring in Computer Science at the College of Artificial Intelligence won third place at the Robot Competition of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (IEEE ICRA 2024), the world's largest robotics conference. 'EWHA GLAB' team, led by Professor Kim Young-jun, comprised of master’s student Yoo Hyo-jung and undergraduate senior Kwon Min-seo, made such achievement at the “Cloth Manipulation Competition” held during the ICRA from June 13th (Mon) to 17th (Fri) in Yokohama, Japan. EWHA GLAB team scored 0.55 points, surpassing renowned research institutes such as Samsung Beijing Research Institute and the German Center for Artificial Intelligence in Saarbrücken, and secured third place.
(From left) Yoo Hyo-jung and Kwon Min-seo from the Department of Computer Science
ICRA is an academic conference in the robotics field organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), boasting its largest scale and reputation among international academic conferences in robotics and robot AI. Each year, robotics researchers from around the world present the latest technologies, drawing significant attention from academia and industry. The Cloth Manipulation Competition, in which the EWHA GLAB team participated, is one track of the Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition, held for the third time this year. The competition evaluates the technology and excellence of robot AI in finding gripping actions to unfold deformable objects like clothes, fabric, and towels using dual-arm robots and cameras. This technology requires comprehensive utilization of AI robotics, computer graphics, and computer vision, and can be widely applied to service robots, safety robots, and military robots in the near future. A total of 11 globally leading robotics research institutes participated in this year’s competition, including Korea, Japan, China, and Europe.
The EWHA GLAB team utilized an edge extraction model to extract sharp edge points from the numerous point clouds of the fabric obtained through an RGBD camera. They then mathematically analyzed the distribution of these points and surrounding points to determine the robot's gripping actions, leading to their award-winning performance. Despite most participants being senior researchers with doctoral degrees, the EWHA GLAB team stood out as a female team composed of two students, with one undergraduate. This garnered attention from the competition’s organizing committee, professors from Ghent University in Germany.
Yoo Hyo-jung of the EWHA GLAB team said, “I am delighted I could learn a lot through competing with other competitive teams. My field of study is computer graphics, but thanks to my professor’s guidance and encouragement, I could participate in a robotics competition, which is not my major.” Kwon Min-seo stated, “With many researchers and practitioners participating, I felt a lot of pressure, but I am happy and honored to have won the prize as the only female team, and bring recognition to Ewha Womans University.”
The EWHA GLAB team participated in this competition as part of the student creative autonomous project of the Simulation-based Content Convergence Research Center, an ICT Research Center (ITRC) at Ewha, sponsored by the Institute for Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP).