Dongkyu Lee

CTO & Co-Founder at URobotics Corp.

dklee [at] urobotics [dot] ai

I am CTO and Co-Founder at URobotics Corp., a startup developing autonomous navigation software for legged robots. I am also a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering at KAIST, member of the Urban Robotics Lab led by Prof. Hyun Myung. My research focuses on autonomous navigation for legged robots — path planning, decision-making, and long-term field robotics.

Education

Ph.D. Electrical Engineering KAIST 2023 – Present

M.S. Robotics Program KAIST 2021 – 2023

B.S. Electrical & Computer Eng. UOS 2016 – 2021

News

Feb. 2026 DreamFlow accepted to ICRA 2026!
Dec. 2025 DreamWaQ++ accepted to IEEE T-RO 2025!
Oct. 2025 Presented a paper on humanoid locomotion at IEEE Humanoids Workshop 2025!
Jul. 2025 TRG-planner presented as an IROS 2025 Oral!
Apr. 2025 Co-founded URobotics Corp. as CTO!
Jan. 2025 DreamFLEX accepted to ICRA 2025!
Dec. 2024 TRG-planner accepted to IEEE RA-L 2025!
May. 2024 Team DreamTRIP — 2nd Place, Autonomous Quadrupedal Robot Challenge, ICRA 2024, Yokohama!
Feb. 2024 Best Work Award at KROC 2024 RED Show!
May. 2023 Team DreamSTEP — 1st Place, Autonomous Quadrupedal Robot Challenge, ICRA 2023, London!

Research Experience

CTO and Co-Founder

URobotics Corp., South Korea

Mobility Intelligence Team & Robot System Team

Apr. 2025 – Present

Research Intern

KAIST, South Korea

Urban Robotics Lab

Mar. 2021 – Aug. 2021

Research Intern

ETRI, South Korea

AI Research Team

Jan. 2021 – Feb. 2021

Research Intern

MSIT, South Korea

Software Maestro 11th

Jun. 2020 – Dec. 2020

Research Highlights

DreamFlow: Local Navigation Beyond Observation via Conditional Flow Matching in the Latent Space

Jiwon Park*, Dongkyu Lee*, I Made Aswin Nahrendra, Jaeyoung Lim, and Hyun Myung^† (* equal contribution)

IEEE ICRA 2026

[Paper] [Project]

DreamWaQ++: Obstacle-aware Quadrupedal Locomotion with Resilient Multi-modal Reinforcement Learning

I Made Aswin Nahrendra, Byeongho Yu, Minho Oh, Dongkyu Lee, Seunghyun Lee, Hyeonwoo Lee, Hyungtae Lim, and Hyun Myung

IEEE T-RO 2025

[Paper] [Project]

TRG-planner: Traversal Risk Graph-Based Path Planning in Unstructured Environments for Safe and Efficient Navigation

Dongkyu Lee, I Made Aswin Nahrendra, Minho Oh, Byeongho Yu, and Hyun Myung

IEEE RA-L 2025 IROS 2025 Oral

[Paper] [Project]

Learning Resilent Blind Locomotion Controller for Humanoid Robots using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Seunghyun Lee, Dongkyu Lee, Byeongho Yu, I Made Aswin Nahrendra, and Hyun Myung

Sim-to-Real Transfer for Humanoid Robots Workshop @ IEEE Humanoid 2025

[Paper] [Workshop]

DreamFLEX: Learning Fault-Aware Quadrupedal Locomotion Controller for Anomaly Situation in Rough Terrains

Seunghyun Lee, I Made Aswin Nahrendra, Dongkyu Lee, Byeongho Yu, Minho Oh, and Hyun Myung

IEEE ICRA 2025

[Paper] [Project]

LocoVLM: Grounding Vision and Language for Adapting Versatile Legged Locomotion Policies

I Made Aswin Nahrendra, Seunghyun Lee, Dongkyu Lee, and Hyun Myung

SafeVLMs Workshop @ ICRA 2025

[Paper] [Project] [Workshop]

Awards & Honors

Autonomous Quadrupedal Robot Challenge, ICRA 2023, London

🥇 Winner (1st Place)

Team DreamSTEP of KAIST · [Link]

Autonomous Quadrupedal Robot Challenge, ICRA 2024, Yokohama

🥈 2nd Place

Team DreamTRIP of KAIST · [Link]

KROC 2024 RED Show

🏆 Best Work Award

[Announcement]

Other Publications

TRIP: Terrain Traversability Mapping with Risk-Aware Prediction for Enhanced Online Quadrupedal Robot Navigation

Minho Oh, Byeongho Yu, I Made Aswin Nahrendra, Seoyeon Jang, Hyeonwoo Lee, Dongkyu Lee, Seungjae Lee, Yeeun Kim, Marsim Kevin Christiansen, Hyungtae Lim, and Hyun Myung

arXiv, 2024 · [Paper]

B-TMS: Bayesian Traversable Terrain Modeling and Segmentation Across 3D LiDAR Scans and Maps for Enhanced Off-Road Navigation

Minho Oh, Gunhee Shin, Seoyeon Jang, Seungjae Lee, Dongkyu Lee, Wonho Song, Byeongho Yu, Hyungtae Lim, Jaeyoung Lee, and Hyun Myung

IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), 2024 · [Paper]

FARO-Tracker: Fast and Robust Target Tracking System for UAVs in Urban Environment

Dongkyu Lee, EungChang Mason Lee, Hyungtae Lim, Seungwon Song, and Hyun Myung

International Conference on Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications (RiTA), 2022 · [Paper]

CEO-MLCPP: Control-Efficient and Obstacle-Aware Multi-Layer Coverage Path Planner for 3D Reconstruction with UAVs

Eungchang Mason Lee, Sungwook Jung, Seungwon Song, Duckyu Choi, Dongkyu Lee, Seunghyun Lee, Seoktae Kim, and Hyun Myung

International Conference on Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications (RiTA), 2022 · [Paper]

M-BRIC: Design of Mass-Driven Bi-Rotor with RL-Based Intelligent Controller

Dongkyu Lee, EungChang Mason Lee, Duckyu Choi, Junho Choi, Christian Tirtawardhana, and Hyun Myung

International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR), 2022 · [Paper]

Academic Services

Reviewer

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) 2026
IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE) 2025
IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics (T-FR) 2025