Award Winners


Award Title Authors Affiliation Citation
Student Design of an Autonomous Racecar: Perception, State Estimation and System Integration de la Iglesia Valls, Miguel; Hendrikx, Hubertus Franciscus Cornelis; Reijgwart, Victor; Meier, Fabio Vito; Sa, Inkyu; Dubé, Renaud; Gawel, Abel Roman; Bürki, Mathias; Siegwart, Roland ETH Zürich; ETH Zürich; ETH Zürich; ETH Zurich; ETH Zürich; ETH Zurich; ETH Zürich; Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH Zurich; Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH Zuerich; ETH Zurich For design and implementation of a fully autonomous racecar that uses fully onboard sensors to race on unknown race tracks at competitive speeds, and won the Formula Student Driverless competition.
Medical A lightweight and efficient portable soft exosuit for paretic ankle assistance in walking after stroke Bae, Jaehyun; Siviy, Christopher; Rouleau, Michael; Menard, Nicolas; O’Donnell, Kathleen; Galiana, Ignacio; Athanassiu, Maria; Ryan, Danielle; Bibeau, Christine; Sloot, Lizeth; Kudzia, Pawel; Ellis, Terry; Awad, Louis; Walsh, Conor James Harvard University; Harvard University; Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; Virginia Tech; Wyss Institute; Harvard University – Wyss Institute; Harvard University; The Wyss Institute; Harvard University, Wyss Institute; Harvard University; Harvard University; Simon Fraser University; Boston University; Harvard University; Harvard University A compact, self-contained and portable soft robotic exosuit that can assist with walking in patients with stroke in the near future.
Conference Compact Design of a Hydraulic Driving Robot for Intra-operative MRI-guided Bilateral Stereotactic Neurosurgery Guo, Ziyan; Dong, Ziyang; Lee, Kit-Hang; Cheung, Chim Lee; Fu, Hing Choi; Ho, Justin Di-Lang; He, Haokun; Poon, Wai Sang; Chan, Tat-Ming; Kwok, Ka-Wai The University of Hong Kong; The University of Hong Kong; The University of Hong Kong; The University of Hong Kong; The University of Hong Kong; The University of Hong Kong; The University of Hong Kong; the University of Hong Kong; The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Prince of Wales Hospital; The University of Hong Kong A highly compact hydraulic system with integrated tracking for MRI-guided neurosurgery. The work is complete from design and development to detailed evaluation studies, which demonstrated a clear translational path to clinical studies.
Manipulation Decentralized Adaptive Control for Collaborative Manipulation Culbertson, Preston; Schwager, Mac Stanford University; Stanford University; Stanford University For design and implementation of a distributed adaptive controller for multiple robots to manipulate unknown objects collaboratively.
Multi Pairwise Consistent Measurement Set Maximization for Robust Multi-robot Map Merging Mangelson, Joshua; Dominic, Derrick; Eustice, Ryan; Vasudevan, Ram University of Michigan; University of Michigan; University of Michigan; University of Michigan; University of Michigan The paper describes a method for robust selection of inter-map loop closures in multi-robot SLAM, by cleverly formulating it as a maximum clique problem which can be solved efficienty. It makes fewer assumptions than competing approaches, yet is shown to quickly find high-quality solutions on synthetic and real data sets. Thus the method promises to have practical impact on a real-world problem of intense research interest.
Vision Optimization Beyond the Convolution: Generalizing Spatial Relations with End-to-End Metric Learning Jund, Philipp; Eitel, Andreas; Abdo, Nichola; Burgard, Wolfram University of Freiburg; University of Freiburg; University of Freiburg; University of Freiburg; University of Freiburg Developed a continuous and generalizable representation of spatial relations between objects.
Cognitive Social Attention: Modeling Attention in Human Crowds Vemula, Anirudh; Muelling, Katharina; Oh, Jean Carnegie Mellon University; Carnegie Mellon University; Carnegie Mellon University; Carnegie Mellon University An attention-based model for accurately predicting the trajectories of pedestrians in crowd is proposed, where an RNN mixture model of temporal and spatial trajectories of crowd is designed to learn, so called, “social attention,” representing the relative influence of individual pedestrian on the planning behavior of the other.
Service PRM-RL: Long-range Robotic Navigation Tasks by Combining Reinforcement Learning and Sampling-based Planning Faust, Aleksandra; Ramirez, Oscar Alejandro; Fiser, Marek; Oslund, Kenneth; Francis, Anthony; Davidson, James; Tapia, Lydia Google Brain; Google Brain; Google; Google; Google; Google; Google Inc.; University of New Mexico A hierarchical planning method that combines sampling based path planning with RL agents for long-range navigation tasks in very large environments. This method is evaluated extensively both in simulation and physical experiments.
Automation Accurate and Adaptive In situ Fabrication of an Undulated Wall using an On-Board Visual Sensing System Lussi, Manuel; Sandy, Timothy; Doerfler, Kathrin; Hack, Norman; Gramazio, Fabio; Kohler, Matthias Daniel; Buchli, Jonas ETH Zürich; ETH Zurich; ETH Zürich; ETH Zurich, Institute for Technology in Architecture; ETH Zurich; ETH Zurich; ETH Zurich; Deepmind This paper utilizes automation in a new area and the use in construction is truly novel.
HRI Interactively Picking Real-World Objects with Unconstrained Spoken Language Instructions Hatori, Jun; Kikuchi, Yuta; Kobayashi, Sosuke; Takahashi, Kuniyuki; Tsuboi, Yuta; Unno, Yuya; Ko, Wilson Kien Ho; Tan, Jethro Preferred Networks; Preferred Networks; Preferred Networks; Preferred Networks; Preferred Networks; Preferred Networks; Preferred Networks; Preferred Networks, Inc.; Preferred Networks, Inc The novelty of this paper is in the combination of existing methods for object bounding box prediction with natural language processing into a single framework. An interesting paper with possible applications very soon.
UAV Design, Modeling and Control of Aerial Robot DRAGON: Dual-rotor-embedded-multilink Robot with the Ability of Multi-deGree-of-freedom Aerial TransformatiON ZHAO, MOJU; Anzai, Tomoki; Shi, Fan; Chen, Xiangyu; Okada, Kei; Inaba, Masayuki The University of Tokyo; The University of Tokyo; The University of Tokyo; The University of Tokyo; The University of Tokyo; The University of Tokyo; The University of Tokyo Design and implementation of a transformable flying robot with applications to aerial manipulation and modular task-dependent structural adaptation.