VINE Team Wins RA-L Best Paper Award for the Second Year in a Row at 2026 IEEE ICRA!!

The VINE Team from our laboratory has won the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) Best Paper Award two years in a row, further demonstrating its world-class research competitiveness in the field of soft robotics.

The award was presented at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2026), one of the world’s largest and most prestigious robotics conferences, held in Vienna, Austria. The winning paper, titled Self-Wearing Adaptive Garments via Soft Robotic Unfurling (SWAG), was written by Dr. Nam Gyun Kim and Professor Jee-Hwan Ryu in collaboration with Professor Allison M. Okamura’s CHARM Lab at Stanford University.

The RA-L Best Paper Award is one of the most competitive honors in the robotics community. It recognizes only a very small number of outstanding papers based on academic contribution, technical originality, experimental completeness, and future application potential. This year, only five papers were selected from more than 1,700 papers published in IEEE RA-L in 2025, making the competition ratio approximately 340 to 1.

This achievement is even more remarkable because the VINE Team has received this prestigious award for two consecutive years. Winning once is already a significant accomplishment, but receiving the award two years in a row clearly demonstrates the team’s sustained excellence, creativity, and global impact in soft robotics research.

The award-winning SWAG mechanism presents a bold new vision for the future of assistive robotics. Rather than relying on conventional rigid robots that grasp and manipulate clothing from the outside, SWAG transforms the garment itself into a soft robotic system. A pneumatically growing soft structure, called a “subvine,” is embedded inside channels in the clothing. As the subvine grows forward, the garment unfurls from the tip and naturally wraps around the human body, enabling autonomous dressing.

The key innovation of SWAG is that the garment does not slide directly over the skin. Instead, it gently unfolds over the body from the tip, significantly reducing friction between the skin and the garment. This simple yet powerful idea opens a new pathway toward safer, more comfortable, and more adaptive dressing assistance.

By challenging the conventional paradigm of robot-assisted dressing, this research goes beyond incremental improvement and introduces a new direction for human-centered assistive robotics. The work suggests a future in which clothing itself can become intelligent, adaptive, and robotic.

Congratulations to Professor Jee-Hwan Ryu, Dr. Nam Gyun Kim, and the VINE Team on receiving this outstanding award and achieving this impressive recognition for the second year in a row.

Don’t forget to check out this video!!!

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTQVNQ1ze0Y )

(Paper Title: Self-Wearing Adaptive Garments via Soft Robotic Unfurling, DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2025.3634909)

Jungyue Han