At the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2025), which took place 19-23 June in Atlanta, Georgia, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) recognized the recipients of 2025 awards, including the Pioneer Award, Distinguished Service Award, and more.
“We are so proud to honor so many distinguished individuals, companies, and groups through the RAS Awards,” said Seth Hutchinson, IEEE RAS Awards Committee Chairman. “These awards serve as a way to not only highlight the advancements in robotics but shine a light on some of the incredible people who are leading the efforts to revolutionize the field. We congratulate all of the 2025 winners and commend them for their efforts to continue the evolution of the field of robotics.”
During the event, IEEE RAS paid tribute to its 2025 IEEE Fellows. The grade of Fellow acknowledges unusual distinction in the profession and is reserved for a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in the field. The following were recognized as 2025 Fellows:
● John Aloimonos — “For contributions to active perception and the perception of action”
● Ron Alterovitz — “For contributions to medical steerable needles and motion planning for medical robots”
● Hongsoo Choi — “For contributions to the development and implementation of medical tethered and untethered microrobots”
● Andreas Krause — “For contributions to active sensing, Bayesian optimization, and learning-based control”
● Jee-Hwan Ryu — “For contributions to passivation and stability-assured control in haptics and telerobotics”
● Davide Scaramuzza — “For contributions to micro-drones visual navigation and robust perception with event cameras”
● Vincent Vanhoucke — “For contributions to deep learning applied to perception and robotics”
● Qingsong Xu — “For contributions to the design and control of robotic micro-and nano-positioning and manipulation systems”
In addition to Fellowships, the RAS celebrated the recipients of its 2025 awards. The following lists the 2025 awards and their recipients:
Pioneer, Distinguished Service, Leadership, and Early Career Awards
● RAS Pioneer Award – Antonio Bicchi “For pioneering fundamental contributions to artificial hands, haptics, and human-robot collaboration, and for their applications to robotics and prosthetics” and Wolfram Burgard “For pioneering contributions to probabilistic state estimation, perception, and learning in robotics”
● RAS Distinguished Service Award – Paolo Fiorini “For his service and contributions to RAS committees, conferences, and educational activities”; Peter Ian Corke “For service to the robotics community through education on and dissemination of knowledge”; and Todd Murphey “For his exemplary leadership as Vice President of Publications Activities in the launching of two new RAS journals”
● RAS George Saridis Leadership Award in Robotics and Automation – Frank Chongwoo Park “For leadership in society restructuring and new publications initiatives, and contributions to geometric methods in robotics”; and Allison Okamura “For foundational research in haptics, medical robotics, and robot design, as well as service to the Robotics and Automation Society”
● RAS Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation – Wenzhen Yuan “For innovative contributions to high-resolution robotic tactile sensing”; Shuran Song “For contributions to scalable robot learning and their real-world applications”; Abhishek Gupta “For pioneering contributions to real-world robotic reinforcement learning”; Yuke Zhu “For groundbreaking contributions to robot learning and embodied artificial intelligence, and broadly used open-source software platforms for robot learning”; and Changliu Liu “For significant advancements in intelligent robot control and learning that enables safe and efficient human-robot collaborations”
● RAS Early Government or Industry Career Award in Robotics and Automation – Daniel Leidner “For outstanding contributions to the advancement of AI-assisted telerobotics and its transformative impact on space exploration and societal needs”
Product Innovation Awards
● RAS Award for Product Innovation – Apptronik – Apptronik builds machines that empower humans to live to our fullest potential; Rugged Robotics – Rugged Robotics transforms construction with autonomous robots, automating field layout with precision and efficiency, paving the way for future innovation; and Ambi Robotics – Ambi Robotics is an artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics company developing advanced solutions that scale ecommerce operations to meet demand while empowering humans to handle more
Publication Awards
● IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award – Certifiably Correct Range-Aided SLAM, Alan Papalia, Andrew Fishberg, Brendan O’Neill, Jonathan How, David Rosen, and John Leonard
● IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award Honorable Mention – Port-Hamiltonian Neural ODE Networks on Lie Groups For Robot Dynamics Learning and Control, Thai Duong, Abdullah Altawaitan Jason Stanley, and Nikolay Atanasov; Enhancing the Performance of a Biomimetic Robotic Elbow-and-Forearm System Through Bionics-Inspired Optimization, Haosen Yang, Guowu Wei, and Lei Ren; On-Manifold Strategies for Reactive Dynamical System Modulation with Non-Convex Obstacles, Christopher K. Fourie, Nadia Figueroa, and Julie Shah; Modeling and Design of Lattice-Reinforced Pneumatic Soft Robots, Dong Wang, Chengru Jiang, and Guoying Gu; Task and Motion Planning for Execution in the Real, Tianyang Pan, Rahul Shome, and Lydia Kavraki
● IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Best Paper Award – Sim-to-Real of Soft Robots With Learned Residual Physics, Junpeng Gao, Mike Y. Michelis, Andrew Spielberg, Robert K. Katzschmann; PV-OSIMr: A Lowest Order Complexity Algorithm for Computing the Delassus Matrix, Ajay Suresha Sathya, Wilm Decré, Jan Swevers; Learning-Based Minimally-Sensed Fault-Tolerant Adaptive Flight Control, Michael O’Connell, Joshua Cho, Matthew Anderson, Soon-Jo Chung; Adaptive Neural Computed Torque Control for Robot Joints With Asymmetric Friction Model, Ruiqing Luo, Zhengtao Hu, Menghui Liu, Liang Du, Sheng Bao, Jianjun Yuan; Inflatable-Structure-Based Working-Channel Securing Mechanism for Soft Growing Robots, Dongoh Seo, Nam Gyun Kim, Jee-Hwan Ryu
● IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Best Paper Award Honorable Mention: SEDMamba: Enhancing Selective State Space Modelling With Bottleneck Mechanism and Fine-to-Coarse Temporal Fusion for Efficient Error Detection in Robot-Assisted Surgery, Jialang Xu, Nazir Sirajudeen, Matthew Boal, Nader Francis, Danail Stoyanov, Evangelos B. Mazomenos; A Novel Safety-Aware Energy Tank Formulation Based on Control Barrier Functions, Youssef Michel, Matteo Saveriano, Dongheui Lee; S3E: A Multi-Robot Multimodal Dataset for Collaborative SLAM, Dapeng Feng, Yuhua Qi, Shipeng Zhong, Zhiqiang Chen, Qiming Chen, Hongbo Chen; On the Benefits of Visual Stabilization for Frame- and Event-Based Perception, Juan Pablo Rodríguez-Gómez, Jose Ramiro Martínez-de Dios, Aníbal Ollero, Guillermo Gallego; Aggregating Multiple Bio-Inspired Image Region Classifiers for Effective and Lightweight Visual Place Recognition, Bruno Arcanjo, Bruno Ferrarini, Maria Fasli, Michael Milford, Klaus D. McDonald-Maier, Shoaib Ehsan
● IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Outstanding Associate Editors – Xiang Li, Tsinghua University; Paolo Di Lillo, University of Cassino and Southern Lazio; Francesco Pierri, University of Basilicata; Zongwei Wu, University of Wurzburg; Wei Pan, University of Manchester; Alberto Maria Metelli, Politecnico di Milano; Daniele Fontanelli, University of Trento; Miaomiao Liu, Australian National University; Holger Caesar, TU Delft; Xieyuanli Chen, National University of Defense Technology
● IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Outstanding Reviewers – Dominic Jones, University of Leeds; Guoteng Zhang, Shandong University; Jens Behley, University of Bonn; Jialei Shi, Imperial College London; Matias Mattamala, University of Oxford
● IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine Best Paper Award – New Era in Cultural Heritage Preservation: Cooperative Aerial Autonomy for Fast Digitalization of Difficult-to-Access Interiors of Historical Monuments, Pavel Petracek, Vit Kratky, Tomas Baca, Matej Petrlik, Martin Saska
● IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine Distinguished Service Award – Thomas Alessandro Ciarfuglia, Outstanding Reviewer; Jiaming Qi, Outstanding Reviewer; Maria Pozzi, Outstanding Associate Editor
● IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best Paper Award – Reducing Uncertainty Using Placement and Regrasp Planning on a Triangular Corner Fixture, Zhengtao Hu, Weiwei Wan, Kei-suke Koyama, and Kensuke Harada
● IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best New Application Paper Award – Advance Scheduling for Chronic Care under Online or Offline Revisit Uncertainty, Xiaoxiao Shen, Shi-Chang Du, Yan-Ning Sun, Poly Z. H. Sun, Rob Law, and Edmond Q. Wu; Smart Actuation for End-Edge Industrial Control Systems, Yehan Ma, Yebin Wang, Stefano Di Cairano, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Jianlin Guo, Philip Orlik, Xinping Guan, and Chenyang Lu
● IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics Best Paper Award – Steady-Hand Eye Robot 3.0: Optimization and Benchtop for Subretinal Injection, Alireza Alamdar, David E. Usevitch, Jiahao Wu, Russell H. Taylor, Peter Gehlbach, Iulian Iordachita
Other Awards
● RAS Most Active Technical Committee Award -Technical Committee for Cognitive Robotics
● RAS Student Branch Chapter of the Year Award – North South University, RAS Student Branch Chapter – Bangladesh; Ecole Nationale D’Ingenieurs De Tunis, RAS Student Branch Chapter – Tunisia; Federal University of Campina Grande, RAS Student Branch Chapter – Brazil
● ICRA Most Influential Paper Award – A Multi-State Constraint Kalman Filter for Vision-aided Inertial Navigation, Anastasios I. Mourikis and Stergios I. Roumeliotis, Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
The 2026 IEEE Robotics and Automation Award, Fellow Awards, and RAS Awards will be recognized next year at ICRA 2026, which takes place 1–5 June in Vienna, Austria.
