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KAIST Teams Win Both International Challenges at ICRA 2026 and CVPR 2026
Two research teams from KAIST have claimed first place in international challenge competitions held at the world’s premier robotics and computer vision conferences.
KAIST (President Kwang-Hyung Lee) announced that the ACDC-K Team and the Curaytor Team, both from the laboratory of Prof. Hyun Myung in the School of Electrical Engineering, won first place in international challenge competitions held in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2026) and the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2026), respectively.
The achievement highlights the global competitiveness of KAIST’s robotic perception and spatial intelligence technologies, with two teams from the same laboratory securing victories in leading international competitions across distinct research fields.
The ACDC-K Team won first place among more than 60 participating teams in the SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) category of the Hilti×Trimble SLAM Challenge 2026, held during the Open Challenges in Robotics for Asset Inspection (OCRAIM) Workshop at ICRA 2026 in Vienna, Austria, from June 1 to 5.
Jointly organized by Hilti, Trimble, and the University of Oxford, the challenge evaluates robotic localization and mapping performance using sensor data collected from real construction sites. Participants were required to address practical challenges frequently encountered in construction environments, including non-overlapping front and rear fisheye camera configurations, low-texture indoor scenes, and rapid camera motion.
To tackle these challenges, the ACDC-K Team developed a robust visual-inertial SLAM system that fuses front and rear fisheye camera data with inertial measurements. By integrating feature-point and feature-line observations with adaptive constraints and correction mechanisms, the team achieved highly reliable localization and mapping performance in complex construction environments.
Meanwhile, the Curaytor Team won first place among eight participating teams in the Nothing Stands Still (NSS) Challenge 2026, held during the Computer Vision for the Built World (CV4AEC) Workshop at CVPR 2026 in Denver, Colorado, from June 3 to 7.
Jointly organized by Stanford University, ETH Zurich, and Oregon State University, the NSS Challenge evaluates 3D point cloud registration technologies for construction and industrial environments that evolve over time.
The Curaytor Team developed a novel multi-registration framework capable of aligning multiple LiDAR scans collected across different times and locations. The framework integrates feature extraction, correspondence estimation, robust global registration, registration confidence assessment, and change-aware refinement techniques. As a result, the team achieved highly accurate registration performance even in environments containing structural changes and dynamic objects.
“This achievement demonstrates the robustness of our visual-inertial SLAM and 3D LiDAR registration technologies in complex and constantly changing real-world environments,” said Prof. Hyun Myung. “It is particularly meaningful that our students secured first-place finishes in highly competitive international challenges hosted at two of the world’s most prestigious conferences in robotics and computer vision.”
Prof. Hyun Myung’s laboratory has consistently demonstrated excellence in spatial intelligence research. The laboratory previously won first place in the LiDAR track and ranked first among academic teams in the vision track of the Hilti SLAM Challenge in 2023. In addition, the Curaytor Team successfully defended its title in the NSS Challenge, securing back-to-back championships in 2025 and 2026.
2026.06.19 View 1719 -
Professor Hyun Myung's Team Wins First Place in a Challenge at ICRA by IEEE
< Photo 1. (From left) Daebeom Kim (Team Leader, Ph.D. student), Seungjae Lee (Ph.D. student), Seoyeon Jang (Ph.D. student), Jei Kong (Master's student), Professor Hyun Myung >
A team of the Urban Robotics Lab, led by Professor Hyun Myung from the KAIST School of Electrical Engineering, achieved a remarkable first-place overall victory in the Nothing Stands Still Challenge (NSS Challenge) 2025, held at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the world's most prestigious robotics conference, from May 19 to 23 in Atlanta, USA.
The NSS Challenge was co-hosted by HILTI, a global construction company based in Liechtenstein, and Stanford University's Gradient Spaces Group. It is an expanded version of the HILTI SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping)* Challenge, which has been held since 2021, and is considered one of the most prominent challenges at 2025 IEEE ICRA.*SLAM: Refers to Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, a technology where robots, drones, autonomous vehicles, etc., determine their own position and simultaneously create a map of their surroundings.
< Photo 2. A scene from the oral presentation on the winning team's technology (Speakers: Seungjae Lee and Seoyeon Jang, Ph.D. candidates of KAIST School of Electrical Engineering) >
This challenge primarily evaluates how accurately and robustly LiDAR scan data, collected at various times, can be registered in situations with frequent structural changes, such as construction and industrial environments. In particular, it is regarded as a highly technical competition because it deals with multi-session localization and mapping (Multi-session SLAM) technology that responds to structural changes occurring over multiple timeframes, rather than just single-point registration accuracy.
The Urban Robotics Lab team secured first place overall, surpassing National Taiwan University (3rd place) and Northwestern Polytechnical University of China (2nd place) by a significant margin, with their unique localization and mapping technology that solves the problem of registering LiDAR data collected across multiple times and spaces. The winning team will be awarded a prize of $4,000.
< Figure 1. Example of Multiway-Registration for Registering Multiple Scans >
The Urban Robotics Lab team independently developed a multiway-registration framework that can robustly register multiple scans even without prior connection information. This framework consists of an algorithm for summarizing feature points within scans and finding correspondences (CubicFeat), an algorithm for performing global registration based on the found correspondences (Quatro), and an algorithm for refining results based on change detection (Chamelion). This combination of technologies ensures stable registration performance based on fixed structures, even in highly dynamic industrial environments.
< Figure 2. Example of Change Detection Using the Chamelion Algorithm>
LiDAR scan registration technology is a core component of SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) in various autonomous systems such as autonomous vehicles, autonomous robots, autonomous walking systems, and autonomous flying vehicles.
Professor Hyun Myung of the School of Electrical Engineering stated, "This award-winning technology is evaluated as a case that simultaneously proves both academic value and industrial applicability by maximizing the performance of precisely estimating the relative positions between different scans even in complex environments. I am grateful to the students who challenged themselves and never gave up, even when many teams abandoned due to the high difficulty."
< Figure 3. Competition Result Board, Lower RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error) Indicates Higher Score (Unit: meters)>
The Urban Robotics Lab team first participated in the SLAM Challenge in 2022, winning second place among academic teams, and in 2023, they secured first place overall in the LiDAR category and first place among academic teams in the vision category.
2025.05.30 View 15382