ICRA2008 Awards

The ICRA 2008 Program Committee accepted 661 of the 1463 paper submissions, and 22 of the 29 stand alone video submissions. All accepted papers will soon be available on IEEE Xplore. (check 'New Content; on the Xplore entry page.) The stand alone videos were included on the ICRA DVD Proceedings and will soon be available on the RAS Website.

The following outstanding video and six papers were selected for awards:

• Best Conference Paper: Planning in Information Space for a Quadrotor Helicopter in a GPS Denied Environment: Ruijie He, Sam Prentice and Nicholas Roy
• Best Student Paper: Decentralized Feedback Controllers for Multi-Agent Teams in Environments with Obstacles: Nora Ayanian and Vijay Kumar
• Best Automation Paper: Fabrication of Functional Gel-microbead for Local Environment Measurement in Microchip: Hisataka Maruyama, Fumihito Arai, and Toshio Fukuda
• Best Vision Paper (Endowed by Ben Wegbreit): Accelerated Appearance-Only SLAM, Mark Cummins and Paul Newman
• Best Manipulation Paper (Endowed by Ben Wegbreit) Adaptive Grasping by Multi Fingered Hand with Tactile Sensor Based on Robust Force and Position Control: Taro Takahashi, Toshimitsu Tsuboi, Takeo Kishida, Yasunori Kawanami, Satoru Shimizu, Masatsugu Iribe, Tetsuharu Fukushima and Masahiro Fujita
• KUKA Service Robotics Best Paper: VSA-II: A Novel Prototype of Variable Stiffness Actuator for Safe and Performing Robots Interacting with Humans: Riccardo Schiavi, Giorgio Grioli, Soumen Sen and Antonio Bicchi
• Best Video: The OmniTread OT-4 Serpentine Robot: Johann Borenstein and Adam Borrell

Best Conference Paper Finalists:

• Employing Wave Variables for Coordinated Control of Robots with Distributed Control Architecture, Christian Ott and Yoshihiko Nakamura
• Trajectory Generation for Dynamic Bipedal Walking through Qualitative Model Based Manifold Learning by Subramanian Ramamoorthy and Benjamin Kuipers
• Consensus Learning for Distributed Coverage Control, Mac Schwager, Jean-Jacques E. Slotine and Daniela Rus

Best Student Paper Finalists (The names of nominated students are in bold font):

• Hybrid Simulation of a Dual-Arm Space Robot Colliding with a Floating Object, Ryohei Takahashi, Hiroto Ise, Daisuke Sato, Atsushi Konno and Masaru Uchiyama
• Partial barrier coverage: Using game theory to optimize probability of undetected intrusion in polygonal environments, Stephen Kloder and Seth Hutchinson
• Gecko-Inspired Climbing Behaviors on Vertical and Overhanging Surfaces, Daniel Santos, Barrett Heyneman, Sangbae Kim, Noe Esparza and Mark Cutkosky
• High Quality 3D LIDAR from Low Cost 2D Ranging Under General Vehicle Motion, Alastair Harrison and Paul Newman

Best Automation Paper Finalists

• Dynamic Analysis of a High-Bandwidth, Large-Strain, PZT Cellular Muscle Actuator with Layered Strain Amplification, Thomas Secord, Jun Ueda and Harry Asada
• Event-Based Two Degree-Of-Freedom Control for Micro-/Nanoscale Systems Based on Differential Flatness, Ruoting Yang, T. J. Tarn and Mingjun Zhang
• On the Design of Traps for Feeding 3D Parts on Vibratory Tracks, Onno Goemans and Frank van der Stappen

Best Manipulation Paper (sponsored by Ben Wegbreit) Finalists:

• Skilled-Motion Plannings of Multi-Body Systems Based upon Riemannian Distance, Masahiro Sekimoto, Suguru Arimoto, Ji-Hun Bae and Sadao Kawamura
• Transportation of Hard Disk Media using Electrostatic Levitation and Tilt Control, Ewoud Frank van West, Akio Yamamoto and Toshiro Higuchi
• Manipulating Articulated Objects With Interactive Perception by Dov Katz and Oliver Brock
• Synergistic Design of a Humanoid Hand with Hybrid DC Motor - SMA Array Actuators Embedded in the Palm, Josiah Rosmarin and Harry Asada

Best Vision Paper (sponsored by Ben Wegbreit) Finalists

Image Moments-based Ultrasound Visual Servoing: Rafik Mebarki, Alexandre Krupa and Francois Chaumette
• Accurate Calibration of Intrinsic Camera Parameters by Observing Parallel Light Pairs, Ryusuke Sagawa and Yasushi Yagi
• Information-Optimal Selective Data Return for Autonomous Rover Traverse Science and Survey, David R. Thompson, Trey Smith and David Wettergreen
• Robust and Efficient Stereo Feature Tracking for Visual Odometry, Andrew E. Johnson, Steven B. Goldberg, Yang Cheng and Larry H. Matthies