Congratulations to the #ICRA2024 best paper winners

The 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) best paper winners and finalists in the various different categories have been announced. The recipients were revealed during an award luncheon at the conference, which took place from 13-17 May in Yokohama, Japan.

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award in Automation

Winner

TinyMPC: Model-Predictive Control on Resource-Constrained Microcontrollers, Anoushka Alavilli, Khai Nguyen, Samuel Schoedel, Brian Plancher, and Zachary Manchester

Finalists

• A Movable Microfluidic Chip with Gap Effect for Manipulation of Oocytes, Shuzhang Liang, Satoshi Amaya, Hirotaka Sugiura, Hao Mo, Yuguo Dai, and Fumihito Arai
• Under Pressure: Learning-Based Analog Gauge Reading in the Wild, Maurits Reitsma, Julian Keller, Kenneth Blomqvist, and Roland Siegwart
• Efficient Composite Learning Robot Control Under Partial Interval Excitation, Tian Shi, Weibing Li, Haoyong Yu, and Yongping Pan
• MORALS: Analysis of High-Dimensional Robot Controllers via Topological Tools in a Latent Space, Ewerton Vieira, Aravind Sivaramakrishnan, Sumanth Tangirala, Edgar Granados, Konstantin Mischaikow, and Kostas E. Bekris

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award in Cognitive Robotics

Winner

VLFM: Vision-Language Frontier Maps for Semantic Navigation, Naoki Yokoyama, Sehoon Ha, Dhruv Batra, Jiuguang Wang, and Bernadette Bucher

Finalists

• NoMaD: Goal Masked Diffusion Policies for Navigation and Exploration, Ajay Sridhar, Dhruv Shah, Catherine Glossop, and Sergey Levine
• Resilient Legged Local Navigation: Learning to Traverse with Compromised Perception End-to-End, Chong Zhang, Jin Jin, Jonas Frey, Nikita Rudin, Matias Mattamala, Cesar Cadena Lerma, and Marco Hutter
• Learning Continuous Control with Geometric Regularity from Robot Intrinsic Symmetry, Shengchao Yan, Baohe Zhang, Yuan Zhang, Joschka Boedecker, and Wolfram Burgard
• Learning Vision-Based Bipedal Locomotion for Challenging Terrain, Helei Duan, Bikram Pandit, Mohitvishnu S. Gadde, Bart Jaap Van Marum, Jeremy Dao, Chanho Kim, and Alan Fern

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award in Robot Manipulation

Winner

SARA-RT: Scaling up Robotics Transformers with Self-Adaptive Robust Attention, Isabel Leal, Krzysztof Choromanski, Deepali Jain, Avinava Dubey, Jacob Varley, Michael S. Ryoo, Yao Lu, Frederick Liu, Vikas Sindhwani, Tamas Sarlos, Kenneth Oslund, Karol Hausman, Quan Vuong, and Kanishka Rao

Finalists

• Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Ken Goldberg, Lawrence Yunliang Chen, Gaurav Sukhatme, Shivin Dass, Lerrel Pinto, Yuke Zhu, Yifeng Zhu, Shuran Song, Oier Mees, Deepak Pathak, Hao-Shu Fang, Henrik Iskov Christensen, Mingyu Ding, Youngwoon Lee, Dorsa Sadigh, Ilija Radosavovic, Jeannette Bohg, Xiaolong Wang, Xuanlin Li, Krishan Rana, Kento Kawaharazuka, Tatsuya Matsushima, Jihoon Oh, Takayuki Osa, Oliver Kroemer, Beomjoon Kim, Edward Johns, Freek Stulp, Jan Schneider, Jiajun Wu, Yunzhu Li, Heni Ben Amor, Lionel Ott, Roberto Martin-Marin, Karol Hausman, Quan Vuong, Pannag Sanketi, Nicolas Heess, Vincent Vanhoucke, Karl Pertsch, Stefan Schaal, Cheng Chi, Chuer Pan, and Alex Bewley
• Towards Generalizable Zero-Shot Manipulation via Translating Human Interaction Plans, Homanga Bharadhwaj, Abhinav Gupta, Vikash Kumar, and Shubham Tulsiani
• Hearing Touch: Audio-Visual Pretraining for Contact-Rich Manipulation, Jared Mejia, Victoria Dean, Tess Hellebrekers, and Abhinav Gupta
• DenseTact-Mini: An Optical Tactile Sensor for Grasping Multi-Scale Objects From Flat Surfaces, Won Kyung Do, Ankush Ankush Dhawan, Mathilda Kitzmann, and Monroe Kennedy
• Constrained Bimanual Planning with Analytic Inverse Kinematics, Thomas Cohn, Seiji Shaw, Max Simchowitz, and Russ Tedrake

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award on Human-Robot Interaction

Winner

CoFRIDA: Self-Supervised Fine-Tuning for Human-Robot Co-Painting, Peter Schaldenbrand, Gaurav Parmar, Jun-Yan Zhu, James Mccann, and Jean Oh

Finalists

• POLITE: Preferences Combined with Highlights in Reinforcement Learning, Simon Holk, Daniel Marta, and Iolanda Leite
• MateRobot: Material Recognition in Wearable Robotics for People with Visual Impairments, Junwei Zheng, Jiaming Zhang, Kailun Yang, Kunyu Peng, and Rainer Stiefelhagen
• Robot-Assisted Navigation for Visually Impaired through Adaptive Impedance and Path Planning, Pietro Balatti, Idil Ozdamar, Doganay Sirintuna, Luca Fortini, Mattia Leonori, Juan M. Gandarias, and Arash Ajoudani
• Incremental Learning of Full-Pose Via-Point Movement Primitives on Riemannian Manifolds, Tilman Daab, Noémie Jaquier, Christian R. G. Dreher, Andre Meixner, Franziska Krebs, and Tamim Asfour
• Supernumerary Robotic Limbs to Support Post-Fall Recoveries for Astronauts, Erik Ballesteros, Sang-Yoep Lee, Kalind Carpenter, and Harry Asada

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award in Medical Robotics

Winner

Exoskeleton-Mediated Physical Human-Human Interaction for a Sit-to-Stand Rehabilitation Task, Lorenzo Vianello, Emek Baris Kucuktabak, Matthew Short, Clément Lhoste, Lorenzo Amato, Kevin Lynch, and Jose L. Pons

Finalists

• Intraoperatively Iterative Hough Transform Based In-plane Hybrid Control of Arterial Robotic Ultrasound for Magnetic Catheterization, Zhengyang Li, Magejiang Yeerbulati, and Qingsong Xu
• Efficient Model Learning and Adaptive Tracking Control of Magnetic Micro-Robots for Non-Contact Manipulation, Yongyi Jia, Shu Miao, Junjian Zhou, Niandong Jiao, Lianqing Liu, and Xiang Li
• Colibri5: Real-Time Monocular 5-DoF Trocar Pose Tracking for Robot-Assisted Vitreoretinal Surgery, Shervin Dehghani, Michael Sommersperger, Mahdi Saleh, Alireza Alikhani, Benjamin Busam, Peter Gehlbach, Ioan Iulian Iordachita, Nassir Navab, and M. Ali Nasseri
• Hybrid Volitional Control of a Robotic Transtibial Prosthesis using a Phase Variable Impedance Controller, Ryan Posh, Jonathan Allen Tittle, David Kelly, James Schmiedeler, and Patrick M. Wensing
• Design and Implementation of a Robotized Hand-held Dissector for Endoscopic Pulmonary Endarterectomy, Runfeng Zhu, Xilong Hou, Wei Huang, Lei Du, Zhong Wu, Hongbin Liu, Henry Chu, and Qing Xiang Zhao

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award on Mechanisms and Design

Winner

Design and Modeling of a Nested Bi-cavity-based Soft Growing Robot for Grasping in Constrained Environments, Haochen Yong, Fukang Xu, Chenfei Li, Han Ding, and Zhigang Wu

Finalists

• Optimized Design and Fabrication of Skeletal Muscle Actuators for Bio-syncretic Robots, Lianchao Yang, Chuang Zhang, Ruiqian Wang, Yiwei Zhang, and Lianqing Liu
• Lissajous Curve-Based Vibrational Orbit Control of a Flexible Vibrational Actuator with a Structural Anisotropy, Yuto Miyazaki and Mitsuru Higashimori
• Dynamic Modeling of Wing-Assisted Inclined Running with a Morphing Multi-Modal Robot, Eric Sihite, Alireza Ramezani, and Gharib Morteza

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award on Multi-Robot Systems

Winner

Do We Run Large-Scale Multi-Robot Systems on the Edge? More Evidence for Two-Phase Performance in System Size Scaling, Jonas Kuckling, Robin Luckey, Viktor Avrutin, Andrew Vardy, Andreagiovanni Reina, and Heiko Hamann

Finalists

• Observer-based Distributed MPC for Collaborative Quadrotor-Quadruped Manipulation of a Cable-Towed Load, Shaohang Xu, Yi’An Wang, Wentao Zhang, Chin Pang Ho, and Lijun Zhu
• Learning for Dynamic Subteaming and Voluntary Waiting in Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Collaborative Scheduling, Williard Joshua Jose and Hao Zhang
• Asynchronous Distributed Smoothing and Mapping via On-Manifold Consensus ADMM, Daniel Mcgann, Kyle Lassak, and Michael Kaess
• Uncertainty-Bounded Active Monitoring of Unknown Dynamic Targets in Road-Networks with Minimum Fleet, Shuaikang Wang, Yiannis Kantaros, and Meng Guo

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award in Service Robotics

Winner

Learning to Walk in Confined Spaces Using 3D Representation, Takahiro Miki, Joonho Lee, Lorenz Wellhausen, and Marco Hutter

Finalists

• Censible: A Robust and Practical Global Localization Framework for Planetary Surface Missions, Jeremy Nash, Quintin Dwight, Lucas Saldyt, Haoda Wang, Steven Myint, Adnan Ansar, and Vandi Verma
• Efficient and Accurate Transformer-Based 3D Shape Completion and Reconstruction of Fruits for Agricultural Robots, Federico Magistri, Rodrigo Marcuzzi, Elias Ariel Marks, Matteo Sodano, Jens Behley, and Cyrill Stachniss
• CoPAL: Corrective Planning of Robot Actions with Large Language Models, Frank Joublin, Antonello Ceravola, Pavel Smirnov, Felix Ocker, Joerg Deigmoeller, Anna Belardinelli, Chao Wang, Stephan Hasler, Daniel Tanneberg, and Michael Gienger
• CalliRewrite: Recovering Handwriting Behaviors from Calligraphy Images without Supervision, Yuxuan Luo, Zekun Wu, and Zhouhui Lian

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award in Robot Vision

Winner

NGEL-SLAM: Neural Implicit Representation-based Global Consistent Low-Latency SLAM System, Yunxuan Mao, Xuan Yu, Kai Wang, Yue Wang, Rong Xiong, and Yiyi Liao

Finalists

• HEGN: Hierarchical Equivariant Graph Neural Network for 9DoF Point Cloud Registration, Adam Misik, Driton Salihu, Xin Su, Heike Brock, and Eckehard Steinbach
• Deep Evidential Uncertainty Estimation for Semantic Segmentation under Out-Of-Distribution Obstacles, Siddharth Ancha, Philip Osteen, and Nicholas Roy
• SeqTrack3D: Exploring Sequence Information for Robust 3D Point Cloud Tracking, Yu Lin, Zhiheng Li, Yubo Cui, and Zheng Fang
• Ultrafast Square-Root Filter-based VINS, Yuxiang Peng, Chuchu Chen, and Guoquan Huang
• Universal Visual Decomposer: Long-Horizon Manipulation Made Easy, Zichen Zhang, Yunshuang Li, Osbert Bastani, Abhishek Gupta, Dinesh Jayaraman, Yecheng Jason Ma, and Luca Weihs

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Winner

Time-Optimal Gate-Traversing Planner for Autonomous Drone Racing, Chao Qin, Maxime Simon Joseph Michet, Jingxiang Chen, and Hugh H.-T. Liu

Finalists

• A Trajectory-based Flight Assistive System for Novice Pilots in Drone Racing Scenario, Yuhang Zhong, Guangyu Zhao, Qianhao Wang, Guangtong Xu, Chao Xu, and Fei Gao
• Co-Design Optimisation of Morphing Topology and Control of Winged Drones, Fabio Bergonti, Gabriele Nava, Valentin Wüest, Antonello Paolino, Giuseppe L’Erario, Daniele Pucci, and Dario Floreano
• FC-Planner: A Skeleton-guided Planning Framework for Fast Aerial Coverage of Complex 3D Scenes, Chen Feng, Haojia Li, Mingjie Zhang, Xinyi Chen, Boyu Zhou, and Shaojie Shen
• Sequential Trajectory Optimization for Externally-Actuated Modular Manipulators with Joint Locking, Jaeu Choe, Jeongseob Lee, Hyunsoo Yang, Hai-Nguyen (Hann) Nguyen, and Dongjun Lee
• Spatial Assisted Human-Drone Collaborative Navigation and Interaction through Immersive Mixed Reality, Luca Morando and Giuseppe Loianno

IEEE ICRA Best Student Paper Award

Winner

Optimized Design and Fabrication of Skeletal Muscle Actuators for Bio-syncretic Robots, Lianchao Yang, Chuang Zhang, Ruiqian Wang, Yiwei Zhang, and Lianqing Liu

Finalists

• TinyMPC: Model-Predictive Control on Resource-Constrained Microcontrollers, Anoushka Alavilli, Khai Nguyen, Samuel Schoedel, Brian Plancher, and Zachary Manchester
• Goal Masked Diffusion Policies for Unified Navigation and Exploration, Ajay Sridhar, Dhruv Shah, Catherine Glossop, and Sergey Levine
• Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Ken Goldberg, Lawrence Yunliang Chen, Gaurav Sukhatme, Shivin Dass, Lerrel Pinto, Yuke Zhu, Yifeng Zhu, Shuran Song, Oier Mees, Deepak Pathak, Hao-Shu Fang, Henrik Iskov Christensen, Mingyu Ding, Youngwoon Lee, Dorsa Sadigh, Ilija Radosavovic, Jeannette Bohg, Xiaolong Wang, Xuanlin Li, Krishan Rana, Kento Kawaharazuka, Tatsuya Matsushima, Jihoon Oh, Takayuki Osa, Oliver Kroemer, Beomjoon Kim, Edward Johns, Freek Stulp, Jan Schneider, Jiajun Wu, Yunzhu Li, Heni Ben Amor, Lionel Ott, Roberto Martin-Martin, Karol Hausman, Quan Vuong, Pannag Sanketi, Nicolas Heess, Vincent Vanhoucke, Karl Pertsch, Stefan Schaal, Cheng Chi, Chuer Pan, and Alex Bewley
• POLITE: Preferences Combined with Highlights in Reinforcement Learning, Simon Holk, Daniel Marta, and Iolanda Leite
• Exoskeleton-Mediated Physical Human-Human Interaction for a Sit-to-Stand Rehabilitation Task, Lorenzo Vianello, Emek Baris Kucuktabak, Matthew Short, Clément Lhoste, Lorenzo Amato, Kevin Lynch, and Jose L. Pons
• Design and Modeling of a Nested Bi-cavity- based Soft Growing Robot for Grasping in Constrained Environments, Haochen Yong, Fukang Xu, Chenfei Li, Han Ding, and Zhigang Wu
• Observer-based Distributed MPC for Collaborative Quadrotor-Quadruped Manipulation of a Cable-Towed Load, Shaohang Xu, Yi’An Wang, Wentao Zhang, Chin Pang Ho, and Lijun Zhu
• Censible: A Robust and Practical Global Localization Framework for Planetary Surface Missions, Jeremy Nash, Quintin Dwight, Lucas Saldyt, Haoda Wang, Steven Myint, Adnan Ansar, and Vandi Verma
• HEGN: Hierarchical Equivariant Graph Neural Network for 9DoF Point Cloud Registration, Adam Misik, Driton Salihu, Xin Su, Heike Brock, and Eckehard Steinbach
• A Trajectory-based Flight Assistive System for Novice Pilots in Drone Racing Scenario, Yuhang Zhong, Guangyu Zhao, Qianhao Wang, Guangtong Xu, Chao Xu, and Fei Gao

IEEE ICRA Best Conference Paper Award

Winners

• Goal Masked Diffusion Policies for Unified Navigation and Exploration, Ajay Sridhar, Dhruv Shah, Catherine Glossop, and Sergey Levine
• Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Ken Goldberg, Lawrence Yunliang Chen, Gaurav Sukhatme, Shivin Dass, Lerrel Pinto, Yuke Zhu, Yifeng Zhu, Shuran Song, Oier Mees, Deepak Pathak, Hao-Shu Fang, Henrik Iskov Christensen, Mingyu Ding, Youngwoon Lee, Dorsa Sadigh, Ilija Radosavovic, Jeannette Bohg, Xiaolong Wang, Xuanlin Li, Krishan Rana, Kento Kawaharazuka, Tatsuya Matsushima, Jihoon Oh, Takayuki Osa, Oliver Kroemer, Beomjoon Kim, Edward Johns, Freek Stulp, Jan Schneider, Jiajun Wu, Yunzhu Li, Heni Ben Amor, Lionel Ott, Roberto Martin-Martin, Karol Hausman, Quan Vuong, Pannag Sanketi, Nicolas Heess, Vincent Vanhoucke, Karl Pertsch, Stefan Schaal, Cheng Chi, Chuer Pan, and Alex Bewley

Finalists

• TinyMPC: Model-Predictive Control on Resource-Constrained Microcontrollers, Anoushka Alavilli, Khai Nguyen, Samuel Schoedel, Brian Plancher, and Zachary Manchester
• POLITE: Preferences Combined with Highlights in Reinforcement Learning, Simon Holk, Daniel Marta, and Iolanda Leite
• Exoskeleton-Mediated Physical Human-Human Interaction for a Sit-to-Stand Rehabilitation Task, Lorenzo Vianello, Emek Baris Kucuktabak, Matthew Short, Clément Lhoste, Lorenzo Amato, Kevin Lynch, and Jose L. Pons
• Optimized Design and Fabrication of Skeletal Muscle Actuators for Bio-syncretic Robots, Lianchao Yang, Chuang Zhang, Ruiqian Wang, Yiwei Zhang, and Lianqing Liu
• Design and Modeling of a Nested Bi-cavity- based Soft Growing Robot for Grasping in Constrained Environments, Haochen Yong, Fukang Xu, Chenfei Li, Han Ding, and Zhigang Wu
• Observer-based Distributed MPC for Collaborative Quadrotor-Quadruped Manipulation of a Cable-Towed Load, Shaohang Xu, Yi’An Wang, Wentao Zhang, Chin Pang Ho, and Lijun Zhu
• Censible: A Robust and Practical Global Localization Framework for Planetary Surface Missions, Jeremy Nash, Quintin Dwight, Lucas Saldyt, Haoda Wang, Steven Myint, Adnan Ansar, and Vandi Verma
• HEGN: Hierarchical Equivariant Graph Neural Network for 9DoF Point Cloud Registration, Adam Misik, Driton Salihu, Xin Su, Heike Brock, and Eckehard Steinbach
• A Trajectory-based Flight Assistive System for Novice Pilots in Drone Racing Scenario, Yuhang Zhong, Guangyu Zhao, Qianhao Wang, Guangtong Xu, Chao Xu, and Fei Gao