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About

Sungsoo Rhim is a robotics researcher whose work spans autonomous mobile robotics, human-robot collaboration, and safety engineering — fields that have grown increasingly critical as robots transition from isolated industrial environments into shared human spaces. His early contributions include pioneering performance evaluation criteria for autonomous cleaning robots (2007, 40 citations), establishing foundational benchmarks for assessing mobility, dust collection, and operational noise that helped shape the emerging consumer robotics industry. Rhim's most sustained and impactful body of work addresses human-robot collision safety. Through rigorous experimental studies, he has quantified pain onset and pressure pain thresholds during physical human-robot contact, directly informing safety standards for collaborative robots — work that has collectively attracted over 60 citations. His velocity control algorithms and real-time collision evaluation methods provide practical engineering solutions that help robots operate near humans without endangering them. Beyond safety, Rhim has contributed to mobile manipulator path planning using reinforcement learning, modular robot kinematics, and vibration suppression. His research on head-collision safety in 7-DOF manipulators further demonstrates his attention to real-world deployment risks. Collectively, his work represents a coherent effort to make intelligent robots genuinely safe, adaptable, and deployable alongside people in both industrial and everyday environments.