DAVIAN Robotics — website

This is the source for davian-robotics.github.io, the public site for DAVIAN Robotics, the robotics research group of DAVIAN Lab at KAIST AI. It is a build-free static page: index.html plus css/style.css, js/render.js, and the data files under data/ render everything — no bundler, no npm install, no dependencies. GitHub Pages serves the repository root as-is.

Add a project

1. Put the demo clip and its poster frame in assets/media/ (see Media rules below for encoding).

2. Copy the template object at the top of data/projects.js and fill it in. Delete any optional field you don't have:

   {
     id: 'short-slug',                       // required, unique, lowercase
     title: 'PAPER: Full Title',             // required
     authors: ['pmh9960', 'Jane Doe (SNU)'], // required; ids link, plain strings do not
     venue: 'NeurIPS 2025',                  // optional; leave it out for a preprint and the card says "Preprint"
     year: 2025,                             // required, sorts the grid (newest first); use venue year if present, else arXiv posting year
     tags: ['manipulation', 'vla'],          // optional, drives the filter chips
     media: {                                // optional; omit until the file exists
       type: 'video',                        // 'video' | 'image'
       src: 'assets/media/slug.mp4',
       poster: 'assets/media/slug.jpg',      // required when type is 'video'
     },
     summary: { en: 'One or two sentences.' },  // English summary
     links: {                                // optional; a missing key renders no button
       paper: 'https://arxiv.org/abs/...',
       code: 'https://github.com/DAVIAN-Robotics/...',
       model: 'https://huggingface.co/DAVIAN-Robotics/...',
       data: 'https://huggingface.co/datasets/DAVIAN-Robotics/...',
       project: 'https://...',
     },
     featured: true,                         // optional; promotes it to the Highlights band
   }

   On year: use the year of the accepted venue, not the arXiv posting year — a paper posted in 2025 but accepted at CVPR 2026 gets year: 2026. Only fall back to the arXiv year when there is no venue yet. This field is what the grid sorts on, so getting it wrong misorders the whole page.

   None of the six projects currently on the site set media, so every card today falls back to a plain typographic tile (see mediaHTML in js/render.js). Adding a demo clip is the single most visible improvement a contributor can make.

3. If an author is new, decide whether they belong in data/people.js. An authors entry that matches a key in window.PEOPLE renders as a link everywhere the project appears; anything else renders as plain text (e.g. 'Jane Doe (SNU)'). Only add someone to PEOPLE when you can point at a page that actually ties them to KAIST / DAVIAN / one of the lab's papers — Korean names collide constantly, and a wrong link under a real person's name is a real error, while leaving a name unlinked costs nothing. When in doubt, leave it as a plain string.

Add a person to People

1. If they are not in window.PEOPLE yet, add them there first (same rule as above: only with a page that ties them to the lab).

2. Add an entry to window.MEMBERS at the bottom of data/people.js:

   { person: 'githubid', role: 'phd', interests: 'Reinforcement Learning, VLA' },

   • role is one of 'professor', 'postdoc', 'phd', 'ms', 'alumni-phd', 'alumni-ms'.
   • affiliation is optional and is printed after the role: role: 'alumni-ms', affiliation: 'Holiday Robotics' reads "M.S. Alumni · Holiday Robotics".
   • Copy interests from the lab page (https://davian.kaist.ac.kr/people) when the person is listed there.

3. Put a 300x400 (3:4) JPEG at assets/people/<person>.jpg, the face in the upper half. Many phone photos are stored sideways with an EXIF rotation flag, so straighten the pixels before saving (e.g. PIL ImageOps.exif_transpose). If there is no photo yet, set photo: false and the card shows the person's initials.

Ordering — do not sort by hand

Every list on the page is sorted in code, so the order you write things in a data file does not decide what readers see (it only breaks ties):

List	Rule	Function (js/render.js)
Research cards	date newest first; same month keeps the order of data/projects.js	sortProjects
News rows	date newest first; same month keeps the order of data/news.js	sortNews
People	the professor first, then by number of papers in data/projects.js that list the person as an author, most first; a tie goes to whoever joined the lab first, which is the order window.MEMBERS is written in	sortMembers

So keep window.MEMBERS in joining order (insert a new member where they joined, not at the end), and to move someone up in People, add the paper — never reorder MEMBERS to fake it. A person only counts for a paper when authors uses their PEOPLE key ('pmh9960'), not a plain-text name. node --test tests/ checks these rules.

Media rules

3–6 second loop, H.264 MP4, 2 MB or less, poster image required.

ffmpeg -i input.mov -t 6 -an -vf "scale=960:-2" -c:v libx264 -crf 28 -movflags +faststart assets/media/<slug>.mp4
ffmpeg -i assets/media/<slug>.mp4 -vframes 1 -q:v 3 assets/media/<slug>.jpg

Then check the size:

du -h assets/media/<slug>.mp4

Over 2 MB, raise -crf (e.g. to 30 or 32) and re-encode.

Preview

Open index.html directly in a browser — no server needed. The data files (data/people.js, data/projects.js) are loaded as plain <script> tags, not fetched, so file:// works with no CORS issues. If you ever change that to a fetch(), this stops working from file:// and a local server becomes mandatory.

If you'd rather use one anyway:

python3 -m http.server 8101

then visit http://localhost:8101.

Before you open a PR

Open the page and check the browser console: it should be free of render: warnings (js/render.js logs one per project that's missing a required field, and that project is silently dropped from the grid). Then run the test suite:

node --test tests/

Node is needed only to run these tests — the site itself has no build step and no dependencies, and there is no package.json.

Language

The site is English-only and follows the system light or dark theme. Edit static text in index.html and research summaries and news notes in data/projects.js and data/news.js.

Deploy

Pushing to main publishes. There is no build step and no CI workflow — GitHub Pages serves the repository root directly.