The Oxford Robotics Institute has seen success after success this month as several postdoctoral researchers were announced as finalists and award winners at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), which was held in Vienna from June 1 to 5.

The conference is one of the main international industry events and is committed to advancing innovation and knowledge exchange in the robotics and automation field. Each year, ICRA recognises the best research contributions across several areas of robotics research including robotic learning, perception, manipulation and automation, as well as various application areas.

Best Paper Award

Postdoctoral researcher in the Dynamic Robotic Systems Group, Dongjiao He was awarded the King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award for her paper “FAST-LIVO2: Fast, Direct LiDAR-Inertial-Visual Odometry” in Transactions on Robotics published during her time at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Hong Kong. The paper presents a fast and direct LiDAR-inertial-visual odometry framework that outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in accuracy, robustness and efficiency across challenging environments. The framework has been tested in underwater autonomous vehicle navigation and airborne mapping, demonstrating the applicability to real-time robotic applications.

Honourable Mention

DPhil researcher Jianeng Wang's paper "Exosense: A Vision-Based Scene Understanding System for Exoskeletons" gained an Honourable Mention award at the conference. Co-written by researchers in the DRS Group and colleagues at Wandercraft in Paris, the paper focuses on developing a self-balancing exoskeleton to support individuals with mobility impairments.

As the use of exoskeletons grows, the systems need to adapt to different environments. Exosense is a vision-centric scene understanding system for the long-term operation of exoskeletons. It includes a wide-field-of-view multi-camera device and integrates spatial and terrain information to create reusable navigational maps for localisation and planning. The system has the potential for integration into a broader wearable sensor ecosystem.

"It’s a great credit to receive this honourable mention. This work would not have been possible without the supervision of Professor Maurice Fallon and all the support from my collaborators”, says Jianeng. “Exosense delivers comprehensive scene understanding for exoskeletons, and we hope our system can bring practical improvements to the navigation and environmental awareness of wearable robotic devices."

Award finalist

Meanwhile, Roland Ilyes, a DPhil researcher in the Goal-Oriented Long-Lived Systems (GOALS) Lab, was announced as an award finalist in the automation category for his paper "Ro-To-Go! Robust Reactive Control with Signal Temporal Logic". Along with co-authors at ORI, the work introduces Signal Temporal Logic Robustness (STL) robustness-to-go as a solution to locality issues – where the robot has difficulty making decisions in the future as it accounts for things that have happened in its past. By introducing an STL robustness-to-go solution, this ensures that the robot only focuses on what it can control relevant to the current decision.  

Collegiate Academic Excellence

Finally, Efimia Panagiotaki, a DPhil researcher from the Mobile Robotics Group, was awarded the Collingwood Prize for Academic Achievement from Pembroke College, University of Oxford. The Collingwood Prize is awarded to two graduate students each year and recognises outstanding contributions to research and the wider academic community.

Efimia was awarded the prize in recognition of her excellent academic contributions during her DPhil studies in Robotics at Oxford. Her research on learned structured inference for scene understanding and localisation has resulted in an extensive publication record, alongside contributions to the robotics community through project leadership, interdisciplinary collaborations, student supervision, and outreach.

“I am truly honoured to receive the Collingwood Prize and grateful to have my work recognised in this way. This award reflects not only my own efforts, but also the support, encouragement, and opportunities I've received from both Pembroke College and the Oxford Robotics Institute. I'm thankful to be part of such inspiring academic communities”, says Efimia.