Jungil Ham

Gwangju, South Korea 61005

I work on spatial AI for robots — robust visual localization and SLAM — from the International Space Station to aerial and field robots.

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Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology

I’m a Ph.D. candidate in the Machine Perception and Intelligence Lab (MPIL) at GIST, advised by Pyojin Kim. I build structure-aware visual localization: San Francisco World (RA-L 2025), SF-SLAM (IEEE T-RO, under review), DTOR, an ISS digital-twin compass, and a microgravity SLAM benchmark on NASA’s Astrobee (ICRA 2026 workshop). Currently working on digital-twin SLAM for Astrobee and dynamic Gaussian Splatting SLAM.

Previously: research intern at the NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group; earlier internships at KIST and SKKU’s Robotics Innovatory. M.S., GIST · B.S., Kwangwoon University. Full details in my CV.

News

Jun 16, 2026	PI-EAT-SLAM thermal Gaussian Splatting SLAM accepted to IROS 2026
Jun 1, 2026	Astrobee microgravity SLAM benchmark presented at the ICRA 2026 Space Robotics Workshop
Oct 19, 2025	SPLiCE single-point LiDAR–camera calibration presented at IROS 2025
Jul 29, 2025	DTOR drift-free visual compass presented at the 2nd Space Robotics Workshop
Jan 2, 2025	San Francisco World, slope-aware 3-DoF visual compass, accepted to IEEE RA-L

Selected Publications

2026

San Francisco SLAM: Structural Localization and Mapping Beyond the Manhattan World

Seonmo Yang*, Jungil Ham*, and Pyojin Kim

IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), under review, 2026

* Equal contribution

Website

What Breaks Monocular SLAM in Microgravity? An Initial Benchmark on Rotation-Dominant Astrobee ISS Sequences

Jungil Ham, Brian Coltin, Ryan Soussan, and Pyojin Kim

In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Space Robotics Workshop (SRW), 2026

Bib HTML PDF Poster Video

@inproceedings{ham2026microgravity,
  title = {What Breaks Monocular SLAM in Microgravity? An Initial Benchmark on Rotation-Dominant Astrobee ISS Sequences},
  author = {Ham, Jungil and Coltin, Brian and Soussan, Ryan and Kim, Pyojin},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Space Robotics Workshop (SRW)},
  year = {2026},
  organization = {IEEE},
  video = {https://youtu.be/YvrE_u011QY},
}

2025

Drift-Free Visual Compass Leveraging Digital Twins for Cluttered Environments

Jungil Ham, Ryan Soussan, Brian Coltin, Hoyeong Chun, and Pyojin Kim

In 2nd Space Robotics Workshop (SRW) at IEEE Space Computing Conference (SCC), 2025

Bib PDF Code

@inproceedings{ham2025dtor,
  title = {Drift-Free Visual Compass Leveraging Digital Twins for Cluttered Environments},
  author = {Ham, Jungil and Soussan, Ryan and Coltin, Brian and Chun, Hoyeong and Kim, Pyojin},
  booktitle = {2nd Space Robotics Workshop (SRW) at IEEE Space Computing Conference (SCC)},
  address = {Pasadena, CA, USA},
  year = {2025},
  organization = {IEEE},
}

San Francisco World: Leveraging Structural Regularities of Slope for 3-DoF Visual Compass

Jungil Ham, Minji Kim, Suyoung Kang, Kyungdon Joo, Haoang Li, and Pyojin Kim

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2025

Bib PDF Code

@article{ham2025san,
  title = {San Francisco World: Leveraging Structural Regularities of Slope for 3-DoF Visual Compass},
  author = {Ham, Jungil and Kim, Minji and Kang, Suyoung and Joo, Kyungdon and Li, Haoang and Kim, Pyojin},
  journal = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
  volume = {10},
  number = {1},
  pages = {382--389},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  doi = {10.1109/LRA.2024.3504315},
}

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