Ewha GLAB Team Wins Second Place in the IEEE ICRA 2026 BARN Challenge N
- Date2026.06.07
- 91
Outstanding Achievement in an International Competition with Autonomous Robot Technology
A graduate student team from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the College of Artificial Intelligence won second place in a robotics competition held at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (IEEE ICRA 2026), the world’s largest robotics conference. The Ewha GLAB team, consisting of master’s student Hahjin Lee and integrated master’s-doctoral student Jiyoung Park from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and advised by Professor Young J. Kim, participated in the BARN Challenge at IEEE ICRA 2026, held in Vienna, Austria, from Monday, June 1 to Friday, June 5, and finished in second place.
BARN Challenge stands for Benchmark Autonomous Robot Navigation. It is an international competition that evaluates the ability of autonomous robots to perceive their surroundings, make decisions, and safely navigate to a target location in complex and narrow environments. The competition, co-organized in part by Professor Daeun Song of the Department of Artificial Intelligence at Ewha, evaluated each team’s autonomous robot navigation system based on overall driving success rate, travel time, and environmental difficulty under standardized conditions, including the Clearpath Jackal robot, 2D LiDAR, and limited onboard computing resources.
This year’s preliminary round featured 17 teams from universities and research institutions across diverse regions, including Asia, North America, South America, and the Middle East, making it a global competition. The participating teams consisted of outstanding researchers in autonomous robots, robot navigation, and AI-based robotics. Based on the preliminary results, the top seven teams were invited to the on-site finals. The Ewha team ranked among the top teams on the preliminary leaderboard while competing against leading researchers from around the world, and ultimately secured second place in the finals through stable robot navigation performance.
The Ewha GLAB team’s technology focuses on reliably handling challenging navigation conditions that robots commonly encounter in real-world environments, such as narrow doorways, complex obstacle arrangements, and sharp turns. In sections where safety is critical, the system refines the robot’s trajectory in detail, while reducing unnecessary computation in relatively safe open spaces. This approach achieves both navigation stability and real-time performance, demonstrating the efficiency and reliability required of AI systems operating in the physical world.
The Ewha GLAB team participated in the competition as part of a student-led creative research project at the Simulated Reality Research Center, an University ICT Research Center (ITRC) established at Ewha Womans University with support from the Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP).