Joel Lee

Hello everyone! I am an AI research engineer at ATLO, where I lead the development of ATTO and DITTO, our AI digital companion robot, as Head of Software.

My research focuses on developing robots with human-like intelligence capabilities for real-world applications, making them intuitive and accessible for everyday users. I’m particularly interested in enhancing robots’ physics-reliable behaviors and commonsense reasoning, while pursuing omni-modality capabilities that allow them to understand across text, vision, audio, and other sensory inputs. My goal is to create AI systems that can handle complex daily tasks autonomously through reinforcement learning and generative models, ultimately bridging the gap between academic AI research and practical robotic solutions.

I completed my M.S. in the A.I. department at Korea University, where I was advised by Sungjoon Choi. Previously, I completed my B.S. at Korea University. My previous internship includes working on reinforcement learning for navigation robots in KAIST MDI Lab and participating in robotics and computer vision projects including a 3 DOF robot arm and color-based tracking algorithm.

Research Topic:

Robotics Control, Large Language Models, Physics-based Simulation

publications

Quality-Diversity based Semi-Autonomous Teleoperation using Reinforcement Learning

Sangbeom Park , Taerim Yoon , Joonhyung Lee , and 2 more authors

Neural Networks, 2024

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Visual Preference Inference: An Image Sequence-Based Preference Reasoning in Tabletop Object Manipulation

Joonhyung Lee , Sangbeom Park , Yongin Kwon , and 3 more authors

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024

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In robotic object manipulation, human preferences can often be influenced by the visual attributes of objects, such as color and shape. These properties play a crucial role in operating a robot to interact with objects and align with human intention. In this paper, we focus on the problem of inferring underlying human preferences from a sequence of raw visual observations in tabletop manipulation environments with a variety of object types, named Visual Preference Inference (VPI). To facilitate visual reasoning in the context of manipulation, we introduce the Chain-of-Visual-Residuals (CoVR) method. CoVR employs a prompting mechanism that describes the difference between the consecutive images (i.e., visual residuals) and incorporates such texts with a sequence of images to infer the user’s preference. This approach significantly enhances the ability to understand and adapt to dynamic changes in its visual environment during manipulation tasks. Furthermore, we incorporate such texts along with a sequence of images to infer the user’s preferences. Our method outperforms baseline methods in terms of extracting human preferences from visual sequences in both simulation and real-world environments. Code and videos are available at: \hrefhttps://joonhyung-lee.github.io/vpi/https://joonhyung-lee.github.io/vpi/
SPOTS: Stable Placement of Objects with Reasoning in Semi-Autonomous Teleoperation Systems

Joonhyung Lee , Sangbeom Park , Jeongeun Park , and 2 more authors

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024

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Pick-and-place is one of the fundamental tasks in robotics research. However, the attention has been mostly focused on the “pick” task, leaving the “place” task relatively unexplored. In this paper, we address the problem of placing objects in the context of a teleoperation framework. Particularly, we focus on two aspects of the place task: stability robustness and contextual reasonableness of object placements. Our proposed method combines simulation-driven physical stability verification via real-to-sim and the semantic reasoning capability of large language models. In other words, given place context information (e.g., user preferences, object to place, and current scene information), our proposed method outputs a probability distribution over the possible placement candidates, considering the robustness and reasonableness of the place task. Our proposed method is extensively evaluated in two simulation and one real world environments and we show that our method can greatly increase the physical plausibility of the placement as well as contextual soundness while considering user preferences.
CLARA: Classifying and Disambiguating User Commands for Reliable Interactive Robotic Agents

Jeongeun Park , Seungwon Lim , Joonhyung Lee , and 4 more authors

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2023

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In this paper, we focus on inferring whether the given user command is clear, ambiguous, or infeasible in the context of interactive robotic agents utilizing large language models (LLMs). To tackle this problem, we first present an uncertainty estimation method for LLMs to classify whether the command is certain (i.e., clear) or not (i.e., ambiguous or infeasible). Once the command is classified as uncertain, we further distinguish it between ambiguous or infeasible commands leveraging LLMs with situational aware context in a zero-shot manner. For ambiguous commands, we disambiguate the command by interacting with users via question generation with LLMs. We believe that proper recognition of the given commands could lead to a decrease in malfunction and undesired actions of the robot, enhancing the reliability of interactive robot agents. We present a dataset for robotic situational awareness, consisting pair of high-level commands, scene descriptions, and labels of command type (i.e., clear, ambiguous, or infeasible). We validate the proposed method on the collected dataset, pick-and-place tabletop simulation. Finally, we demonstrate the proposed approach in real-world human-robot interaction experiments, i.e., handover scenarios.
Robust Detection for Autonomous Elevator Boarding Using a Mobile Manipulator

Seungyoun Shin , Joonhyung Lee , Junhyug Noh , and 1 more author

Asian Conference on Pattern Recognition (ACPR), 2023

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Indoor robots are becoming increasingly prevalent across a range of sectors, but the challenge of navigating multi-level structures through elevators remains largely uncharted. For a robot to operate successfully, it’s pivotal to have an accurate perception of elevator states. This paper presents a robust robotic system, tailored to interact adeptly with elevators by discerning their status, actuating buttons, and boarding seamlessly. Given the inherent issues of class imbalance and limited data, we utilize the YOLOv7 model and adopt specific strategies to counteract the potential decline in object detection performance. Our method effectively confronts the class imbalance and label dependency observed in real-world datasets, Our method effectively confronts the class imbalance and label dependency observed in real-world datasets, offering a promising approach to improve indoor robotic navigation systems.