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About

Dongwoo Ko is a robotics researcher whose work focuses on the critical intersection of safety, passivity, and performance in human-robot interaction. His primary research areas include teleoperation, admittance control, and safety-critical control for robotic systems. Ko’s most impactful contribution is his development of optimization-based control frameworks that ensure robots operate safely under multiple constraints without sacrificing stability. His 2022 paper on quadratic programming-based task scaling for teleoperation (19 citations) addresses the fundamental challenge of maintaining passivity—a key property for stable interaction—when reshaping control inputs through optimization. He further advanced this field with his 2024 work on bidirectional energy flow modulation for passive admittance control (11 citations), providing a rigorous passivity analysis for robots interacting with rigid surfaces. Ko has also introduced backup control barrier functions to guarantee feasibility in safety-critical control, and developed a maximal manipulation framework that enables teleoperated robots to exploit their full control capacity while respecting constraints. His work on teaching dynamic tasks like pan-flipping to collaborative robots demonstrates his commitment to practical applications. With a growing citation record and a focus on foundational safety guarantees, Ko is establishing himself as a rising authority in safe and stable robot control.