Dong Hyeon Kang

Rural Development Administration, National Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Dong Hyeon Kang is a pioneering researcher in agricultural robotics, with a primary focus on automating labor-intensive tasks in horticulture. His work centers on the design and control of intelligent robotic systems for vegetable transplanting and grafting, directly addressing critical labor shortages and efficiency demands in modern farming. Kang’s most influential contribution is the development of a vegetable transplanting robot, which uses a four-fingered gripper to precisely transfer seedlings from nursery trays to plant pots. This work, published in 2012, has garnered 26 citations and established foundational principles for robotic seedling handling. He further advanced the field with an automatic grafting robot for fruit vegetables, integrating image recognition to assess stem diameters of tomatoes and cucumbers. This 2019 study, with 18 citations, significantly reduced grafting failure rates by enabling the robot to adapt to natural biological variation in stem size. By combining mechanical design with computer vision, Kang has created practical, high-precision tools that bring automation to the delicate tasks of transplanting and grafting, making him a key figure in the push toward fully automated, data-driven agriculture.