Meet Daeho Kim, UofT Robotics’ newest faculty affiliate

Daeho Kim
PHOTO BY: Phill Snel

This July Daeho Kim joined the Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering as an assistant professor of civil engineering (Construction), with a focus on co-robotic construction and architectural engineering.

Below we include an excerpt from CivMin:

Q: Can you tell us a little about yourself as an introduction.
I originally came from Seoul, South Korea. My academic journey started from the year 2006 at Yonsei University in South Korea. At there, I got my bachelor’s and master’s degree in Architectural Engineering. I went to the University of Michigan in 2016 and started a new academic journey in Civil engineering (MSc and PhD), exploring a new horizon of construction—co-robotic construction.

Q: Could you explain the focus of your research?
My research focus is to widen the horizon in construction by realizing the true value of co-robotic construction. My goal as a researcher is to lay a solid foundation for human-robot collaboration by establishing safe and cohesive teaming among workers and robots and reconfiguring the existing labor-intensive construction mechanism.

As you know, the construction industry is gradually gearing up to embrace a range of robotic solutions to break through the sustained suffering from low productivity, poor safety, and the shortage of skilled young laborers. Equipment manufacturers have retrofitted their equipment with autonomous kits, and robotics companies are releasing a variety of construction robots at varying degrees of autonomy. Swimming with the tide, the construction academia is exploring new forms of robotic solutions. Imagine the successful deployment of robotic solutions. Robots will carry out repetitive and laborious tasks quickly, while workers can instead focus on supervising robots or troubleshooting uncertainties. It is not so hard to guess such synergy from the cohesive human-robot collaboration would greatly improve the project’s productivity as well as workers’ ergonomics and safety. This innovation will also be a key driver to make construction jobs more intellectual and attractive to prospective workers from various range of demographics.

Promising it may be, it is questionable whether the construction industry is ready to embrace robotic solutions. We need scalable safety technologies at high fidelity, redesign of workspace and work process, and the development of training programs for human workers who are to co-work with robots. Accordingly, my four research agendas are searching answers to the following questions: (i) how to ensure workers’ safety alongside robots at varying autonomy; (ii) how to improve workers’ physical, cognitive, and emotional comforts alongside robots, thereby having more productive and cohesive teaming between them; (iii) what the ideal work environment would it be not for human or robot, but for a human-robot crew; and (iv), how to foster a new workforce specialized in robot collaboration.

Read the full interview on the CivMin website