RISE Winter Capstone Design for the 2025 Academic Year

 - Fostering innovation leaders in regional strategic industries through Sim-to-Real–based hands-on robot training in collaboration with Yuil Robotics Co., Ltd.

Incheon National University (President: In-jae Lee) has declared a full-scale leap toward future industries driven by the convergence of artificial intelligence and robotics. On December 29, the RISE Project Group of Incheon National University held a kick-off meeting at the INU Innovation Center for the “2025 Winter Regional Strategic Industry–Linked Robot Industry–Academia Capstone Design,” conducted as part of the Incheon City RISE unit project “Smart Mobility Specialized Technology Education,” and officially launched a practice-oriented robot talent development platform based on Physical AI.

At the kick-off event marking the start of this five-week industry–academia cooperation program, Professor Woo-yong Kim of the Department of Bio-Robot System Engineering, the supervising professor of the program, delivered encouraging remarks, stating that Physical AI is an emerging future technology and expressing his hope that students would grow into innovation leaders of Korea by understanding industrial sites and preemptively securing future technologies through this opportunity. This was followed by a special lecture titled “The Future of Sim-to-Real Engineers” by Professor Heung-soo Kim of the RISE Project Group, which highlighted the importance and future value of engineers in the process of translating simulations in virtual environments into real-world robot technologies. In addition, a technical exchange session led by Dr. Ki-sung Kim of Yuil Robotics Co., Ltd., who participated as an industry mentor, provided students with an opportunity to hear firsthand perspectives from industrial sites and resolve technical questions.

Through this program, students carry out the entire Sim-to-Real engineering process, developing control algorithms for quadruped robots—such as obstacle avoidance, path planning, and target-reaching—using NVIDIA’s high-performance simulation technologies Isaac Sim and the reinforcement learning engine Isaac Lab, and then transferring these algorithms to real robots. By gaining hands-on experience with technologies that can be immediately applied in industrial settings, students systematically strengthen their problem-solving capabilities based on robot AI.

Students from the Department of Bio-Robot System Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering at Incheon National University are participating in the program, while Yuil Robotics Co., Ltd., a representative robotics company in the Incheon region, is taking part as a practical mentor. By presenting real technical challenges encountered in industrial fields and working together with students to explore solutions, the program is building a model of co-growth and collaborative innovation between the university and regional companies, generating high expectations.

The program includes a total of six sessions, amounting to 12 hours of intensive mentoring, structured step by step to cover the establishment of a high-performance GPU-based practice environment, reinforcement learning–based robot control, object recognition and robot vision, reward function design and simulation verification, and deployment to real robots. In addition, on December 30, participants plan to visit the headquarters of Yuil Robotics Co., Ltd. to experience its production lines and research environment, thereby deepening their understanding of future core job roles.

Professor Ki-won Park of the Department of Bio-Robot System Engineering, the principal investigator of the “Smart Mobility Specialized Technology Education” unit project, emphasized the pioneering significance of the program, stating that Physical AI is a core competency of next-generation robotics industries and that Incheon National University is becoming a leading institution by introducing it first into educational settings to cultivate hands-on engineers in the fields of humanoids, autonomous driving, and mobile robots. He added that the university will continue to produce high-level talent capable of leading future robotics industry innovation by combining its technological capabilities with the growth potential of regional industries. Kim Gyu-won, Head of the RISE Project Group at Incheon National University, also stressed that the university will further strengthen talent development systems linked to regional strategic industries centered on robotics, future vehicles, semiconductors, and bio industries, noting that this effort is a strategic initiative to meet the automation and intelligent manufacturing demands of small and medium-sized manufacturing companies in the Incheon region while fostering co-growth and advancement with regional enterprises as a hub university for technology and talent leading future industries.