RAS Early Career Award

About the award
Description: This award is bestowed on individuals in the early stage of their who have made an identifiable contribution or contributions which have had a major impact on the robotics and/or automation fields. Two awards are presented, one for individuals in academe and another for people in industry or government.
Established: 1999
Prize: $1000 (as of 2008), Plaque and Certificate
Funding: Funded by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.
Eligibility: Any current member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society who is in the early stage of his/her career in the robotics and/or automation field, i.e., less than 7 years after being granted his or her highest earned academic degree. (This period is defined as the time between the date on the nominee's diploma and the close of nominations for the award.)
Basis for judging: 1) Current and potential impact of the submitted contribution (or contributions) on the fields of robotics and/or automation; 2) Contributions to the Society and the profession; 3) Educational contributions. Nominations for the award will be solicited by the Awards Committee; a nomination may be made by someone familiar with the individual‟s work. Three references will be required. The nominator and the references must be Society members. Scoring by the Awards Committee will be on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest; the overall score for a nominee will be obtained by summing the scores determined by each Committee member for that nominee; awardees will be those nominees receiving the top scores in each of the two categories; the Committee may modify the scoring method.
Presentation: At the annual IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, usually held in April or May.
Nomination form: Click to download the form

Winners of this award

Year Winner and reason
2011 Lianqing Liu
For contributions to the development of high efficiency nanorobotics and nanomanipulation systems.”
2011 Hisataka Maruyama
For contributions to micro-nano robotic manipulation and sensing technologies for cell analysis and biological applications
2010 Yu Sun »
For contributions to enabling microrobotic and MEMS technologies for automated cell manipulation and characterization in cell biology and clinical applications
2010 Leandro Barajas »
For pioneering the use of diagnostics and prognostics research in large-scale industrial robotics and automation applications
2009 Nicholas Roy »
For fundamental contributions to planning, machine learning and the development of indoor unmanned air vehicle flight.
2009 Jun Ueda »
For fundamental contributions to robust control of robot dynamics including time-delayed telerobotics, flexible robots, cellular actuator devices, and rehabilitation robots
2008 Nicola Tomatis »
Industry/Government For major contributions in bridging mobile robotics research to real world business applications, for promoting robotics on European and international levels, and for contributions to the Expo-02 and Nesbot Projects.
2008 Michael Montemerlo »
Academic: For fundamental contributions to perception, SLAM, motion planning and navigation; and technical leadership on the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge winning and 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge second place teams.
2008 Tao Zhang »
Cowinner: For leadership and research contributions ot automation science and engineering in the areas of parts handling and semiconductor manufacturing.
2007 Danica Kragic »
For contributions to Visually Guided Manipulation.
2007 Ralf Koeppe »
For outstanding contributions to the design and control of a lightweight robot for industrial applications.
2006 Jingshan Li »
For his significant contribution to the technical field of automation science and engineering, in such areas as modeling and analysis of manufacturing systems, performance evaluation and bottleneck id
2006 Warren Dixon »
For his remarkable achievements at his career stage, including impressive publication record, building a solid robotics program and attracting substantial funding, being selected to receive the National Science Foundation Career Award. receiving the ORNL Early Career Award, and for his innovative research in the areas of nonlinear control design for robotic systems, and of visual servo control.
2005 Ayanna Howard »
(Industry/Government) For contributions to soft-computing techniques for robot reasoning and learning in space applications
2005 Allison Okamura »
(Academe) For contributions to the design and control of haptic devices and to teleoperated and needle-based robot-assisted surgery
2005 Yoky Matsuoka »
(Academe) For contributions to the design of new robotic devices that facilitate neuromuscular assistance, learning, and rehabilitation.
2004 Paolo Pirjanian »
Government/Industry Award:For contributions to mobile robots and commercially practical robots and vision systems.
2004 Karl Bohringer »
Academe: For contributions to physical geometric algorithms and MEMS, with applications to self-assembly and part manipulation.
2004 Katsu Yamane »
For development of algorithms and software for the dynamics of general and complex kinematic chains and their applications to humanoid robotics and computer graphics.
2003 Mingjun Zhang »
For contribution to micro/nano-scale life science automation
2002 Lydia Kavraki »
2001 Kevin Lynch »
2000 Fumihito Arai »
2000 Maja Mataric »
1999 Ning Xi »
Academic career