E-In Son

About

Hi! I am a Ph.D. student at the SNU Vehicle Intelligence Lab, advised by Prof. Seung-Woo Seo, expecting to graduate in August 2027.

My research focuses on learning-based navigation for robots in real-world environments, spanning traversability estimation in unstructured terrain, visual navigation, and world models. Going forward, I aim to develop world models and navigation policies that generalize across environments and robot embodiments.

I am currently seeking research internship opportunities in 2027 (Jan–Aug) and full-time research scientist or postdoc positions starting after Aug 2027, in robot learning and embodied AI.

Publications

Feel-WM

Feeling Terrain Before Crossing: World Models for Off-Road Navigation Under Review

E-In Son, Dong-Wook Kim, Ji-Hoon Hwang, Kangsun Lee, Jisung Bae, Jung-Taak Kim, Seung-Woo Seo

Preprint, 2026

Paper Code

TravPro

Which Terrain Is Better? Preference Learning with VLM Prototypes for Off-Road Traversability Ranking Under Review

Ji-Hoon Hwang, Jisung Bae, E-In Son, Dong-Wook Kim, Jung-Taak Kim, Seung-Woo Seo

Preprint, 2026

Paper

CanonNav

CanonNav: Disentangling Navigation Behavior from Camera Geometry in Cross-Platform Visual Navigation Under Review

Dong-Wook Kim, Ji-Hoon Hwang, E-In Son, Mintaek Oh, Seung-Woo Seo

Preprint, 2026

Paper Project Page Code

ORION

Ordinal Neural Collapse as a Representation Prior for Visual Navigation ECCV 2026

E-In Son*, Jung-Taak Kim*, Seung-Woo Seo

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2026

Paper Project Page

PTS-Map

PTS-Map: Probabilistic Terrain State Map for Uncertainty-Aware Traversability Mapping in Unstructured Environments RA-L 2025

Dong-Wook Kim, E-In Son, Chan Kim, Ji-Hoon Hwang, Seung-Woo Seo

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2025

Paper Code

Follow the Footprints

Follow the Footprints: Self-supervised Traversability Estimation for Off-road Vehicle Navigation based on Geometric and Visual Cues ICRA 2024

Yurim Jeon, E-In Son, Seung-Woo Seo

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024

Paper Code

Adaptive Robot Traversability Estimation

Adaptive Robot Traversability Estimation Based on Self-Supervised Online Continual Learning in Unstructured Environments RA-L 2024

Hyung-Suk Yoon, Ji-Hoon Hwang, Chan Kim, E-In Son, Se-Wook Yoo, Seung-Woo Seo

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2024

Paper

Traversability-aware Adaptive Optimization

Traversability-aware Adaptive Optimization for Path Planning and Control in Mountainous Terrain RA-L 2024

Se-Wook Yoo*, E-In Son*, Seung-Woo Seo

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2024

Paper Project Page

Projects

Mobile Robot for Autonomous Exploration in Unstructured Environments

Agency for Defense Development (ADD)

End-to-end visual navigation with multi-modal localization for long-horizon missions in unknown, hazardous terrain. I lead the planning stack, from learning-based path prediction to real-time safe replanning (2024 – 2026), and previously developed the path tracking module (2022 – 2023).

Awards & Honors

Earth Rover Challenge (1st Place among AI Teams)
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Oct 2024
Academic Excellence Scholarship
Konkuk University
2018 – 2020