We were delighted to receive the Best Paper Award at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration (MFI 2026), held in Pilsen, Czech Republic. The paper, “Lost in Time? Continuous Symmetry and Identifiability in Aided Inertial Navigation with Unknown Measurement Delays,” by Jonathan Kelly, Phone Thiha Kyaw, and Matthew Giamou. Thanks to the conference organizing team for all their efforts and for putting together an outstanding event!
In collaboration with researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology and MIT, we’re organizing the RSS 2026 Workshop: “The Geometry of Motion: Physics-Informed Structures for Learning and Control,” happening on Friday, July 17 at UTS in Sydney, Australia!
The workshop will revisit robot motion from a geometric and physics-informed perspective. We aim to explore how tools such as Lie group theory, Riemannian geometry, and geometric mechanics can be used to construct representations and algorithms that respect the structure of robotic systems. By explicitly encoding geometry and physics, we seek to promote data-efficient learning, improved generalization, greater robustness, interpretability, and safety.
More details and instructions for submission of two-page abstracts are available on the workshop website at: https://sites.google.com/view/rss26-geometry/
We’re delighted to welcome our 2026 cohort of summer research students! Three students from Engineering Science at U of T, Ben Wei, Alison Lei, and Oliver Petrovic (left to right in the image below), will be working on various lab projects, including high-performance planning and dexterous manipulation. Ben is entering his second year of EngSci, Alison her third year, and Oliver his fourth year. Very excited to have you with us for the summer!
Congratulations to recent graduate Dr. Oliver Limoyo, whose research work on PhotoBot was featured in the November 23, 2024 edition of IEEE Spectrum Robotics News! You can read more about PhotoBot in this short article.
Prof. Kelly’s Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Collaborative Robotics has been renewed for a second five-year term. The Laboratory is grateful to NSERC and the Government of Canada for supporting this important program and our research work! A short press release is available from University of Toronto Engineering News.
Members of the STARS Laboratory will be at IROS 2024 in Abu Dhabi! We will present two papers on work led by Oliver Limoyo:
O. Limoyo, J. Li, D. Rivkin, J. Kelly, and G. Dudek, “Photobot: Reference-guided interactive photog- raphy via natural language,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11061.
O. Limoyo, A. Konar, T. Ablett, J. Kelly, F. R. Hogan, and G. Dudek, “Working backwards: Learning to place by picking,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates), 2024. [Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.02352.
Prof. Kelly will also present at the “From Geometry to General Autonomy of Robotic Systems” workshop on Tuesday. See you in the UAE!
Paper presentation times:
Our own Prof. Kelly received the IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine’s Outstanding Associated Editor Award for 2024. The award was presented at ICRA 2024 in Yokohama, Japan. Congratulations to all the awardees!
We’re celebrating 10 years of research in the STARS Laboratory in 2023-2024! The lab was founded and began operating in June of 2013. We’d like to thank all of the lab members and research partners for making the last decade an exiting one! Robotics continues to grow rapidly as a field, and we’re looking forward to the next 10 years!
Thanks to Phys.org for running a feature all about the recent preprint article by Olivier Lamarre (STARS) and Shantanu Malhotra (NASA JPL)! The article describes how to define recovery policies to ensure that a solar-powered rover remains safe (i.e., limits the risk of complete battery depletion) while travelling through permanently shadowed regions (at, e.g., the lunar south pole). The full article is under review; read the preprint on arXiv here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16786
The University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering has released their annual list of Grads to Watch (2023), and we’re delighted that STARS Laboratory alumnus Flip Marić is part of the cohort! Filip’s PhD work focused on geometric methods for robotic manipulation; he was a Joint Educational Placement (JEP) student, co-supervised by Ivan Petrović in the LAMoR group at the University of Zagreb. Filip is now a research scientist at the Samsung AI Centre in Montreal. The full story is available here. Congratulations Filip!
