KAIST Hyun Myung Team Wins Challenge at International Robotics Conference

KAIST announced on May 30 that the Urban Robotics Lab team, led by Professor Hyun Myung from the School of Electrical Engineering, took first place overall in the NSS Challenge (Nothing Stands Still Challenge) at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, held in Atlanta, USA, from May 19 to 23.

(From left) Daebeom Kim, PhD Candidate (Team Leader), Seungjae Lee, PhD Candidate, Seoyeon Jang, PhD Candidate, Jei Gong, Master’s Candidate, Hyun Myung, Professor. Provided by KAIST

The NSS Challenge is an expanded version of the Hilti SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) Challenge, which has been jointly hosted since 2021 by Hilti, a global construction company based in Liechtenstein, and the Gradient Space Group at Stanford University in the United States. It is considered the most prestigious challenge at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

This challenge evaluates how accurately LiDAR scan data, collected at various times in construction and industrial environments where structural changes occur frequently, can be matched.

The Urban Robotics Lab team secured first place overall, surpassing Northwestern Polytechnical University in China (2nd place) and National Taiwan University (3rd place), with their proprietary localization and mapping technology that solves the problem of matching LiDAR data collected across multiple times and spaces. The winning team will receive a prize of $4,000.

Meanwhile, the Urban Robotics Lab team previously participated in the 2022 SLAM Challenge, where they placed second among academic teams, and in 2023, they won first place overall in the LiDAR category and first place among academic teams in the vision category.