RA-L Paper Awards

Each year, the RA-L Senior Volunteers (EiC, Deputy EiC, and Senior Editors) nominate and vote for the Best Paper(s) published online in the previous calendar year. The announcements are made at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation awards event. The winners and honorable mentions of the “RA-L Best Paper Award” for each previous year are listed below.

2021

Winners

Sihao Sun; Giovanni Cioffi; Coen de Visser; Davide Scaramuzza, "Autonomous Quadrotor Flight Despite Rotor Failure With Onboard Vision Sensors: Frames vs. Events," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 580-587, January 2021 (Online publication: 01 January 2021)

Anh-Dzung Doan, Yasir Latif, Tat-Jun Chin, Ian Reid, "HM⁴: Hidden Markov Model With Memory Management for Visual Place Recognition," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 167-174, January 2021 (Online publication: 06 November 2020)

David Bombara, Revanth Konda, Jun Zhang, "Experimental Characterization and Modeling of the Self-Sensing Property in Compliant Twisted String Actuators," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 974-981, April 2021 (Online publication: 02 February 2021)

Gregory P. Meyer, Jake Charland, Shreyash Pandey, Ankit Laddha; Shivam Gautam; Carlos Vallespi-Gonzalez; Carl K. Wellington, "LaserFlow: Efficient and Probabilistic Object Detection and Motion Forecasting," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 526-533, April 2021. (Online publication: 29 December 2020)

Peizhi Zhang, Mitsuhiro Kamezaki, Zhuoyi He, Hiroyuki Sakamoto, Shigeki Sugano, "EPM–MRE: Electropermanent Magnet–Magnetorheological Elastomer for Soft Actuation System and Its Application to Robotic Grasping," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 8181-8188, July 2021 (Online publication: 30 July 2021)

Honorable Mentions

Binbin Xu, Andrew J. Davison, Stefan Leutenegger, "Deep Probabilistic Feature-Metric Tracking," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 223-230, January 2021 (Online publication: 19 November 2020)

Letian Wang, Liting Sun, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Wei Zhan, "Socially-Compatible Behavior Design of Autonomous Vehicles With Verification on Real Human Data," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 2,  pp. 3421-3428, April 2021 (Online publication: 23 February 2021)

Keunhwan Kim, Jonghwi Kim, Jinwhan Kim, "Robust Data Association for Multi-Object Detection in Maritime Environments Using Camera and Radar Measurements," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 5865-5872, July 2021 (Online publication: 28 May 2021)

Di Wu, Yao Zhang, Mouloud Ourak, Kenan Niu, Jenny Dankelman, Emmanuel Vander Poorten, "Hysteresis Modeling of Robotic Catheters Based on Long Short-Term Memory Network for Improved Environment Reconstruction," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 2106-2113, February 2021 (Online publication: 22 February 2021)

Vishnu Dev Amara, Jörn Malzahn; Wesley Roozing, Nikos Tsagarakis, “Blending of Series-Parallel Compliant Actuation With Field Weakening Control for Explosive Motion Generation," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 2076-2083, April 2021 (Online Publication: 22 February 2021)

2020

Winners

G. Valsecchi, R. Grandia, and M. Hutter, "Quadrupedal Locomotion on Uneven Terrain With Sensorized Feet," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 1548-1555, April 2020 (Online publication: 24 January 2020)

K. Xu and N. Pérez-Arancibia, "Electronics-Free Logic Circuits for Localized Feedback Control of Multi-Actuator Soft Robots," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 3990-3997, July 2020 (Online publication: 23 March 2020)

Y. Chen, N. Doshi, and R. Wood, "Inverted and Inclined Climbing Using Capillary Adhesion in a Quadrupedal Insect-Scale Robot," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 4820-4827, July 2020. (Online publication: 19 June 2020)

D. Morrison, P. Corke, and J. Leitner, "EGAD! An Evolved Grasping Analysis Dataset for Diversity and Reproducibility in Robotic Manipulation," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 4368-4375, July 2020 (Online publication: 13 May 2020)

Z. Zhou, X. Chen, and O. Jenkins, "LIT: Light-Field Inference of Transparency for Refractive Object Localization,“ in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 4548-4555, July 2020. (Online publication:10 June 2020)

Honorable Mentions

H. Yang, P. Antonante, V. Tzoumas, and L. Carlone, "Graduated Non-Convexity for Robust Spatial Perception: From Non-Minimal Solvers to Global Outlier Rejection," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 1127-1134, April 2020  (Online publication: 13 January 2020)

P. Kornatowski, M. Feroskhan, W. Stewart, and D. Floreano, "A Morphing Cargo Drone for Safe Flight in Proximity of Humans," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 4233-4240, July 2020. (Online publication: 11 May 2020)

Y. Tian, A. Koppel, A. Bedi, and J. How, "Asynchronous and Parallel Distributed Pose Graph Optimization," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 5819-5826, Oct. 2020.(Online publication: 17 July 2020)

B. Rivière, W. Hönig, Y. Yue, and S. Chung, "GLAS: Global-to-Local Safe Autonomy Synthesis for Multi-Robot Motion Planning With End-to-End Learning," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 4249-4256, July 2020. (Online publication: 11 May 2020)

2019

Winners

P. Florence, L. Manuelli, and R. Tedrake, "Self-Supervised Correspondence in Visuomotor Policy Learning," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 492-499, 2020. (Online publication: 28 November 2019)

Y.-J. Kim, J. Yoon, and Y.-W. Sim, “Fluid Lubricated Dexterous Finger Mechanism for Human-Like Impact Absorbing Capability,” in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters , vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 3971-3978, 2019. (Online publication: 22 July 2019)

T. Kislassi and D. Zarrouk, "A Minimally Actuated Reconfigurable Continuous Track Robot," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 652-659, 2020. (Online publication: 11 December 2019)

N. Kuppuswamy, A. Castro, C. Phillips-Grafflin, A. Alspach, and R. Tedrake, “Fast Model-Based Contact Patch and Pose Estimation for Highly Deformable Dense-Geometry Tactile Sensors,” in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 1811-1818, 2020. (Online publication: 19 December 2019)

T. Ort, K. Murthy, R. Banerjee, S. K. Gottipati, D. Bhatt, I. Gilitschenski, L. Paull, and D. Rus, "MapLite: Autonomous Intersection Navigation Without a Detailed Prior Map," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 556-563, 2020. (Online publication: 19 December 2019.

Honorable Mentions 

C. Della Santina and Daniela Rus, “Control Oriented Modeling of Soft Robots: The Polynomial Curvature Case,” in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 290-298, 2020. (Online publication: 26 November 2019)

G. Shan, Z. Zhang, C. Dai, X. Wang, L.-T. Chu, Y. Sun, “Model-Based Robotic Cell Aspiration: Tackling Nonlinear Dynamics and Varying Cell Sizes,” in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 173-178, 2020. (Online publication: 11 November 2019)

J.-B. Weibel, T. Patten, and M. Vincze, “Addressing the Sim2Real Gap in Robotic 3-D Object Classification,” in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 407-413, 2020. (Online publication: 12 December 2019)

S. Zhou, H. Zhao, W. Chen, Z. Miao, Z. Liu, H. Wang and Y.-H. Liu, “Robust Path Following of the Tractor-Trailers System in GPS-Denied Environments,” in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 500-507, 2020. (Online publication: 29 November 2019)

S. Itadera, E. Dean-Leon, J. Nakanishi, Y. Hasegawa, G. Cheng, “Predictive Optimization of Assistive Force in Admittance Control-Based Physical Interaction for Robotic Gait Assistance,” in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 3609-3616, 2019. (Online publication: 15 July 2019)

2018

Winner

B. Penin, P. R. Giordano, and F. Chaumette, "Vision-Based Reactive Planning for Aggressive Target Tracking While Avoiding Collisions and Occlusions," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 3725-3732, Oct. 2018.

Honorable Mentions

R. Calandra, A. Owens, D. Jayaraman, J. Lin, W. Yuan, J. Malik, E. H. Adelson, and S. Levine, "More Than a Feeling: Learning to Grasp and Regrasp Using Vision and Touch," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 3300-3307, Oct. 2018.

2017 

 
Winner

C. Garcia Cifuentes, J. Issac, M. Wüthrich, S. Schaal and J. Bohg, "Probabilistic Articulated Real-Time Tracking for Robot Manipulation," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 577-584, April 2017. doi: 10.1109/LRA.2016.2645124

2016  

T. Bartelds, A. Capra, S. Hamaza, S. Stramigioli and M. Fumagalli, "Compliant Aerial Manipulators: Toward a New Generation of Aerial Robotic Workers," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 477-483, Jan. 2016.