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About

Won Kyung is a robotics researcher whose work centers on tactile sensing, dexterous manipulation, and multimodal perception for robotic systems. Best known for developing the **DenseTact** family of optical tactile sensors, Kyung has made significant contributions to enabling robots to perceive and interact with the physical world through rich, high-resolution touch feedback. The original DenseTact sensor (2022, 66 citations) demonstrated dense 3D shape reconstruction from contact, while DenseTact 2.0 (2023, 46 citations) extended this capability to simultaneous shape and force reconstruction — a critical advancement for collaborative robotics in manufacturing and domestic applications. Subsequent work scaled these innovations to new challenges: inter-finger small object manipulation leveraged the sensor for complex multi-degree-of-freedom grasping tasks, while DenseTact-Mini addressed the persistent difficulty of handling everyday small objects from flat surfaces. Perhaps most ambitiously, Touch-GS (2024) fused optical tactile sensing with 3D Gaussian Splatting, opening new frontiers in visual-tactile scene representation. With over 150 cumulative citations across five years, Kyung's research is rapidly shaping how robotic systems develop the nuanced, human-like sense of touch necessary for real-world dexterity.