A research team led by Park, Poo Gyeon, professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at POSTECH, won the Gold Prize (1st place overall) at The 3rd Koh Young AI Competition 2025. The team included Minseon Kwak (postdoctoral researcher), Kyungsoo Kim (Ph.D. candidate), and integrated M.S./Ph.D. students Hyesung Hong, Sungrok Moon, and Hyejin Lee.

The competition was organized by the Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems (ICROS) and sponsored by Koh Young Technology Inc. It was held as a special event during The 25th International Conference on Control, Automation, and Systems (ICCAS 2025) on November 6, 2025, at Songdo Convensia in Incheon, Korea. The competition aims to identify outstanding talent in control, robotics, and AI, while strengthening participants’ ability to solve real-world industrial problems.

This year’s challenge focused on an industry-oriented optimization problem: minimizing the inspection cycle time of PCB Automated Optical Inspection (AOI) equipment. Participants were required to optimize the placement of Fields of View (FOV) and inspection paths using real equipment datasets.

Park’s team achieved the highest performance among 13 competing teams by proposing an innovative approach that combines grid-based FOV candidate generation with Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) and heuristic algorithms.

This achievement highlights the global competitiveness of POSTECH’s research in AI-based control and manufacturing automation.