Congratulations!

Mr. Seong-Bin Lee (Ph.D. candidate) received the Outstanding Researcher Award at the “KAIST Institutes (KI) Convergence Day” event held on December 17, 2025. 

축하합니다!

우리 연구실 박사과정 이성빈 학생이 2025년 12월 17일에 개최된 "KAIST Institutes(KI) 융합의 날" 행사에서 우수연구자상을 수상하였습니다.

Mr. Seong-Bin Lee, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at KAIST and a member of the Aerospace Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (Prof. Dae-Young Lee), received the Outstanding Researcher Award at the “KAIST Institutes (KI) Convergence Day 2025” event held on December 17, 2025. He was recognized for his contributions as a member of the KI for Disruptive Robotics.

Mr. Lee drew significant attention from the robotics community after publishing a first-author paper in the December 2025 issue of Science Robotics (Impact Factor 27.5), a world-leading journal in robotics. This award reflects strong recognition of the research excellence and academic impact demonstrated through this work.

The research is regarded as a pioneering example of convergence research, achieving the world’s first development of a deployable airless wheel dedicated to lunar exploration by combining origami-inspired principles with aerospace engineering technologies. In particular, Mr. Lee played a leading role in driving a multi-institutional collaboration across universities, research institutes, and industry partners, including lunar geological environment analysis by the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI), extreme thermal environment and reliability verification by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), as well as partners from Hanyang University and the private company Unmanned Exploration Laboratory (UEL).