RAS Pioneer Award

About the award
Description: To recognize individuals who by virtue of initiating new areas of research, development or engineering, have had a significant impact on development of the robotics and/or automation fields. The award is intended for people who are in the mid or late portions of their careers, i.e., at least 10 years beyond his or her highest earned academic degree.
Established: 1998
Prize: $2,000 (as of 2008), a plaque and a certificate. Normally the award will be given to an individual. In the unlikely event that the awards committee designates two persons as equally worthy of the award, the award will be split between them. If two awards are given in one year (1 in Robotics and one in Automation), the prizes will be equal for each.
Funding: Funded by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.
Eligibility: Any person active in the fields of robotics and/or automation, whether or not they are members of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, are eligible for the award. Members of the Society who have worked as part of a team will also be eligible, provided their contributions can be clearly identified by the Awards Committee.
Basis for judging: Factors include: the pioneering nature of the contribution, whether academic or industrial; the impact or the accumulated impact of the candidate‟s contribution or contributions on the fields of robotics and/or automation.
Presentation: Annually, at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), which is normally held in the mid-April to mid-May period.
Nomination form: Click to download the form

Winners of this award

Year Winner and reason
2009 Matthew Mason »
2008 Russell Taylor »
For pioneering work in medical robotics and in the theory and practice of programmable sensor-based robot systems.
2008 Aristides Requicha »
For pioneering contributions to research and education in solid modeling and programmable automation at the macro and nano scales
2007 Steve Jacobsen
In recognition of outstanding contributions to the design and control of leading edge robots and other animate machines
2007 Takeo Kanade »
In recognition of outstanding contributions to the fields of computer vision, manipulation, autonomous mobile robots and medical robotics
2006 Suguru Arimoto »
For his work on PD and PID control, iterative learning control, and passivity-based control of nonlinear mechanical systems, that represents a source of reference for virtually any scientists dealing with complex systems.
2005 Gerhard Hirzinger »
For his pioneering research in mechatronic devices, teleoperation, articulated hands, and lightweight robots, and his leadership in space robotics programs in Europe.
2005 Hirochika Inoue »
For his life long commitment to innovation and excellence in robotics research in Japan and in the world.
2004 Antal Bejczy »
For seminal technical contributions to robotics and teleoperation, and pioneering research in space robotics and Human-Robot interfaces.
2004 Toshio Fukuda »
For pioneer contributions to the development of cellular/distributed robotics systems and micro/nano robotic systems.
2003 Georges Giralt »
For his contributions in Robot Autonomy and Intelligence and for his pioneering robotics research in France.
2003 Tzyh-Jong Tarn »
For his technical contributions in developing and implementing nonlinear feedback control concepts for robotics and automation
2002 George Bekey »
For leadership in the development of biologically inspired robotic systems, including walking machines, multifingered hands, and multiple robot systems
2001 J Luh »
For the development of Newton-Euler equations of motion in a recursive consideration in real-time computer control since the computational complexity is linearly proportional to the number of joints of the robot. The impact of the Newton-Euler formulation of robot dynamics opened up new perspective for robotics research in kinematics, dynamics and control, such as robot motion control, flexible and redundant robot control, path planning, collision avoidance, control of robots having closed-kinematics-chain linkages, multi-robot control systems, etc.
2001 Richard "Lou" Paul »
2000 Bernie Roth »
In recognition of his work in robot kinematics
1999 Shigeo Hirose »
For contributions in the theory and practice of mobile robotics

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