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About

Yonghoon Ji is a robotics and autonomous systems researcher whose work spans mobile robot navigation, underwater perception, and environmental mapping. His research is distinguished by innovative applications of sensing technologies — from radiation detectors and acoustic cameras to LiDAR and spherical cameras — to enable robots to perceive and reconstruct complex, challenging environments in three dimensions. Ji's most influential contribution, "3D Radiation Imaging Using a Mobile Robot Equipped with a Radiation Detector" (2017, 41 citations), demonstrates how autonomous robots can localize radiation sources, with critical implications for nuclear safety and disaster response. His parallel body of work on acoustic camera-based SLAM and underwater 3D mapping (37 citations) has helped advance the frontier of subsea robotics, addressing the fundamental challenge of navigation in visually degraded environments. His development of ACMarker, an underwater fiducial marker system, and deep learning approaches to forward-looking sonar further illustrate his commitment to practical underwater robotics solutions. Beyond underwater systems, Ji has made notable contributions to terrain traversability analysis for disaster robots (36 citations), indoor localization with spherical cameras, pipeline inspection, and multi-modal LiDAR SLAM. Collectively, his work — accumulating over 225 citations — reflects a researcher dedicated to building robust, adaptable robotic perception systems for real-world, safety-critical applications.