Archive 12.10.2023

Did you have the chance to attend the 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023) in Detroit? Here we bring you the papers that received an award this year in case you missed them. And good news: you can read all the papers because IROS on Demand is open to the public and freely available for one year from Oct 9th. Congratulations to all the winners and finalists!

IROS 2023 Best Overall and Best Student Paper

Winner of the IROS 2023 Best Paper

• Autonomous Power Line Inspection with Drones via Perception-Aware MPC, by Jiaxu Xing, Giovanni Cioffi, Javier Hidalgo Carrio, Davide Scaramuzza.

Winner of the IROS 2023 Best Student Paper

• Controlling Powered Prosthesis Kinematics over Continuous Transitions Between Walk and Stair Ascent, by Shihao Cheng, Curt A. Laubscher, Robert D. Gregg.

Finalists

• Learning Contact-Based State Estimation for Assembly Tasks, by Johannes Pankert, Marco Hutter.
• Swashplateless-elevon Actuation for a Dual-rotor Tail-sitter VTOL UAV, by Nan Chen, Fanze Kong, Haotian Li, Jiayuan Liu, Ziwei Ye, Wei Xu, Fangcheng Zhu, Ximin Lyu, Fu Zhang.
• Towards Legged Locomotion on Steep Planetary Terrain, by Giorgio Valsecchi, Cedric Weibel, Hendrik Kolvenbach, Marco Hutter.
• Decentralized Swarm Trajectory Generation for LiDAR-based Aerial Tracking in Cluttered Environments, by Longji Yin, Fangcheng Zhu, Yunfan Ren, Fanze Kong, Fu Zhang.
• Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection in 3D Point Clouds, by Toan Nguyen, Minh Nhat Vu, An Vuong, Dzung Nguyen, Thieu Vo, Ngan Le, Anh Nguyen.
• Discovering Symbolic Adaptation Algorithms from Scratch, by Stephen Kelly, Daniel Park, Xingyou Song, Mitchell McIntire, Pranav Nashikkar, Ritam Guha, Wolfgang Banzhaf, Kalyanmoy Deb, Vishnu Boddeti, Jie Tan, Esteban Real.
• Parallel cell array patterning and target cell lysis on an optoelectronic micro-well device, by Chunyuan Gan, Hongyi Xiong, Jiawei Zhao, Ao Wang, Chutian Wang, Shuzhang Liang, Jiaying Zhang, Lin Feng.
• FATROP: A Fast Constrained Optimal Control Problem Solver for Robot Trajectory Optimization and Control, by Lander Vanroye, Ajay Suresha Sathya, Joris De Schutter, Wilm Decré.
• GelSight Svelte: A Human Finger-Shaped Single-Camera Tactile Robot Finger with Large Sensing Coverage and Proprioceptive Sensing, by Jialiang Zhao, Edward Adelson.
• Shape Servoing of a Soft Object Using Fourier Series and a Physics-based Model, by Fouad Makiyeh, Francois Chaumette, Maud Marchal, Alexandre Krupa.

IROS Best Paper Award on Agri-Robotics sponsored by YANMAR

Winner

• Visual, Spatial, Geometric-Preserved Place Recognition for Cross-View and Cross-Modal Collaborative Perception, by Peng Gao, Jing Liang, Yu Shen, Sanghyun Son, Ming C. Lin.

Finalists

• Online Self-Supervised Thermal Water Segmentation for Aerial Vehicles, by Connor Lee, Jonathan Gustafsson Frennert, Lu Gan, Matthew Anderson, Soon-Jo Chung.
• Relative Roughness Measurement based Real-time Speed Planning for Autonomous Vehicles on Rugged Road, by Liang Wang, Tianwei Niu, Shuai Wang, Shoukun Wang, Junzheng Wang.

IROS Best Application Paper Award sponsored by ICROS

Winner

• Autonomous Robotic Drilling System for Mice Cranial Window Creation: An Evaluation with an Egg Model, by Enduo Zhao, Murilo Marques Marinho, Kanako Harada.

Finalists

• Visuo-Tactile Sensor Enabled Pneumatic Device Towards Compliant Oropharyngeal Swab Sampling, by Shoujie Li, MingShan He, Wenbo Ding, Linqi Ye, xueqian WANG, Junbo Tan, Jinqiu Yuan, Xiao-Ping Zhang.
• Improving Amputee Endurance over Activities of Daily Living with a Robotic Knee-Ankle Prosthesis: A Case Study, by Kevin Best, Curt A. Laubscher, Ross Cortino, Shihao Cheng, Robert D. Gregg.
• Dynamic hand proprioception via a wearable glove with fabric sensors, by Lily Behnke, Lina Sanchez-Botero, William Johnson, Anjali Agrawala, Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio.
• Active Capsule System for Multiple Therapeutic Patch Delivery: Preclinical Evaluation, by Jihun Lee, Manh Cuong Hoang, Jayoung Kim, Eunho Choe, Hyeonwoo Kee, Seungun Yang, Jongoh Park, Sukho Park.

IROS Best Entertainment and Amusement Paper Award sponsored by JTCF

Winner

• DoubleBee: A Hybrid Aerial-Ground Robot with Two Active Wheels, by Muqing Cao, Xinhang Xu, Shenghai Yuan, Kun Cao, Kangcheng Liu, Lihua Xie.

Finalists

• Polynomial-based Online Planning for Autonomous Drone Racing in Dynamic Environments, by Qianhao Wang, Dong Wang, Chao Xu, Alan Gao, Fei Gao.
• Bistable Tensegrity Robot with Jumping Repeatability based on Rigid Plate-shaped Compressors, by Kento Shimura, Noriyasu Iwamoto, Takuya Umedachi.

IROS Best Industrial Robotics Research for Applications sponsored by Mujin Inc.

Winner

• Toward Closed-loop Additive Manufacturing: Paradigm Shift in Fabrication, Inspection, and Repair, by Manpreet Singh, Fujun Ruan, Albert Xu, Yuchen Wu, Archit Rungta, Luyuan Wang, Kevin Song, Howie Choset, Lu Li.

Finalists

• Learning Contact-Based State Estimation for Assembly Tasks, by Johannes Pankert, Marco Hutter.
• Bagging by Learning to Singulate Layers Using Interactive Perception, by Lawrence Yunliang Chen, Baiyu Shi, Roy Lin, Daniel Seita, Ayah Ahmad, Richard Cheng, Thomas Kollar, David Held, Ken Goldberg.
• Exploiting the Kinematic Redundancy of a Backdrivable Parallel Manipulator for Sensing During Physical Human-Robot Interaction, by Arda Yigit, Tan-Sy Nguyen, Clement Gosselin.

IROS Best Paper Award on Cognitive Robotics sponsored by KROS

Winner

• Extracting Dynamic Navigation Goal from Natural Language Dialogue, by Lanjun Liang, Ganghui Bian, Huailin Zhao, Yanzhi Dong, Huaping Liu.

Finalists

• EasyGaze3D: Towards Effective and Flexible 3D Gaze Estimation from a Single RGB Camera, by Jinkai Li, Jianxin Yang, Yuxuan Liu, ZHEN LI, Guang-Zhong Yang, Yao Guo.
• Team Coordination on Graphs with State-Dependent Edge Cost, by Sara Oughourli, Manshi Limbu, Zechen Hu, Xuan Wang, Xuesu Xiao, Daigo Shishika.
• Is Weakly-supervised Action Segmentation Ready For Human-Robot Interaction? No, Let’s Improve It With Action-union Learning, by Fan Yang, Shigeyuki Odashima, Shochi Masui, Shan Jiang.
• Exploiting Spatio-temporal Human-object Relations using Graph Neural Networks for Human Action Recognition and 3D Motion Forecasting, by Dimitrios Lagamtzis, Fabian Schmidt, Jan Reinke Seyler, Thao Dang, Steffen Schober.

IROS Best Paper Award on Mobile Manipulation sponsored by OMRON Sinic X Corp.

Winner

• A perching and tilting aerial robot for precise and versatile power tool work on vertical walls, by Roman Dautzenberg, Timo Küster, Timon Mathis, Yann Roth, Curdin Steinauer, Gabriel Käppeli, Julian Santen, Alina Arranhado, Friederike Biffar, Till Kötter, Christian Lanegger, Mike Allenspach, Roland Siegwart, Rik Bähnemann.

Finalists

• Placing by Touching: An empirical study on the importance of tactile sensing for precise object placing, by Luca Lach, Niklas Wilhelm Funk, Robert Haschke, Séverin Lemaignan, Helge Joachim Ritter, Jan Peters, Georgia Chalvatzaki.
• Efficient Object Manipulation Planning with Monte Carlo Tree Search, by Huaijiang Zhu, Avadesh Meduri, Ludovic Righetti.
• Sequential Manipulation Planning for Over-actuated UAMs, by Yao Su, Jiarui Li, Ziyuan Jiao, Meng Wang, Chi Chu, Hang Li, Yixin Zhu, Hangxin Liu.
• On the Design of Region-Avoiding Metrics for Collision-Safe Motion Generation on Riemannian Manifolds, by Holger Klein, Noémie Jaquier, Andre Meixner, Tamim Asfour.

IROS Best RoboCup Paper Award sponsored by RoboCup Federation

Winner

• Sequential Neural Barriers for Scalable Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance, by Hongzhan Yu, Chiaki Hirayama, Chenning Yu, Sylvia Herbert, Sicun Gao.

Finalists

• Anytime, Anywhere: Human Arm Pose from Smartwatch Data for Ubiquitous Robot Control and Teleoperation, by Fabian Clemens Weigend, Shubham Sonawani, Drolet Michael, Heni Ben Amor.
• Effectively Rearranging Heterogeneous Objects on Cluttered Tabletops, by Kai Gao, Justin Yu, Tanay Sandeep Punjabi, Jingjin Yu.
• Prioritized Planning for Target-Oriented Manipulation via Hierarchical Stacking Relationship Prediction, by Zewen Wu, Jian Tang, Xingyu Chen, Chengzhong Ma, Xuguang Lan, Nanning Zheng.

IROS Best Paper Award on Robot Mechanisms and Design sponsored by ROBOTIS

Winner

• Swashplateless-elevon Actuation for a Dual-rotor Tail-sitter VTOL UAV, by Nan Chen, Fanze Kong, Haotian Li, Jiayuan Liu, Ziwei Ye, Wei Xu, Fangcheng Zhu, Ximin Lyu, Fu Zhang.

Finalists

• Hybrid Tendon and Ball Chain Continuum Robots for Enhanced Dexterity in Medical Interventions, by Giovanni Pittiglio, Margherita Mencattelli, Abdulhamit Donder, Yash Chitalia, Pierre Dupont.
• c^2: Co-design of Robots via Concurrent-Network Coupling Online and Offline Reinforcement Learning, by Ci Chen, Pingyu Xiang, Haojian Lu, Yue Wang, Rong Xiong.
• Collision-Free Reconfiguration Planning for Variable Topology Trusses using a Linking Invariant, by Alexander Spinos, Mark Yim.
• eViper: A Scalable Platform for Untethered Modular Soft Robots, by Hsin Cheng, Zhiwu Zheng, Prakhar Kumar, Wali Afridi, Ben Kim, Sigurd Wagner, Naveen Verma, James Sturm, Minjie Chen.

IROS Best Paper Award on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics in memory of Motohiro Kisoi sponsored by IRSI

Winner

• mCLARI: A Shape-Morphing Insect-Scale Robot Capable of Omnidirectional Terrain-Adaptive Locomotion, by Heiko Dieter Kabutz, Alexander Hedrick, William Parker McDonnell, Kaushik Jayaram.

Finalists

• Towards Legged Locomotion on Steep, Planetary Terrain, by Giorgio Valsecchi, Cedric Weibel, Hendrik Kolvenbach, Marco Hutter.
• Global Localization in Unstructured Environments using Semantic Object Maps Built from Various Viewpoints, by Jacqueline Ankenbauer, Parker C. Lusk, Jonathan How.
• EELS: Towards Autonomous Mobility in Extreme Environments with a Novel Large-Scale Screw Driven Snake Robot, by Rohan Thakker, Michael Paton, Marlin Polo Strub, Michael Swan, Guglielmo Daddi, Rob Royce, Matthew Gildner, Tiago Vaquero, Phillipe Tosi, Marcel Veismann, Peter Gavrilov, Eloise Marteau, Joseph Bowkett, Daniel Loret de Mola Lemus, Yashwanth Kumar Nakka, Benjamin Hockman, Andrew Orekhov, Tristan Hasseler, Carl Leake, Benjamin Nuernberger, Pedro F. Proença, William Reid, William Talbot, Nikola Georgiev, Torkom Pailevanian, Avak Archanian, Eric Ambrose, Jay Jasper, Rachel Etheredge, Christiahn Roman, Daniel S Levine, Kyohei Otsu, Hovhannes Melikyan, Richard Rieber, Kalind Carpenter, Jeremy Nash, Abhinandan Jain, Lori Shiraishi, Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi, Matthew Travers, Howie Choset, Joel Burdick, Masahiro Ono.
• Multi-IMU Proprioceptive Odometry for Legged Robots, by Shuo Yang, Zixin Zhang, Benjamin Bokser, Zachary Manchester.

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The International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) showcases leading-edge research in robotics. IROS was held in Detroit MI Oct 1-5 and not only showcased research but the latest commercialization in robotics, particularly robotics providers selling into robotics for research or as part of the hardware/software stack. The conference focuses on future directions in robotics, and the latest approaches, designs, and outcomes. It also provides an opportunity to network with the world’s leading roboticists.

Highlights included seeing Silicon Valley Robotics members; Foxglove, Hello Robot, Anyware Robotics and Tangram Vision, also Open Robotics and Intrinsic talking up ROS 2 and the upcoming ROSCon 23. Intrinsic sponsored a ROS/IROS meetup and Clearpath Robotics sponsored the Diversity Cocktails event. OhmniLabs sponsored 3 telepresence robots which were in constant demand touring the expo, the competition floor and the poster sessions. I also met Sol Robotics from the Bay Area, which has quite a unique robot arm structure, that’s super stable with the ability to carry a lot of weight.

There were plenty of rolling and roaming robots, like this Diablo from Direct Drive Tech (world’s first Direct-Drive Self-Balancing Wheeled-Leg Robot), also from Deep Robotics, Unitree Robotics, Fourier Intelligence, Hebi and Westwood Robotics. Also the other legged one, and the rolling robots – Clearpath, Otto, Husarion, Hebi and more. Although they weren’t on the Expo Floor, the Disney keynote session was another highlight with a live robot demo on stage,

And Franka Emika fans will be pleased to hear that not only did they win a ‘best paper’ award, but that the eminent demise of the company is much overstated. It’s a German thing. There are many investors/purchasers lined up to keep the company going while they restructure. And watch out for Psyonics! Psyonics’ smart ability hands and arms, world’s first touch sensing bionic arms, are being used by Apptronik (humanoid for NASA) as well as for people with disabilities.

Full list of IROS Exhibitors is here.

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