Congratulations to our alum Valentin Peretroukhin, who received the 2020 Gordon N. Patterson Award for the top PhD dissertation at UTIAS! His thesis, “Learned Improvements to the Visual Egomotion Pipeline,” is available on the laboratory Publications page. Great work Valentin!

Congratulations to Ph.D. student Olivier Lamarre and postdoc Ahmad Bilal Asghar on winning 1st prize at the IROS 2020 Workshop on Planetary Exploration Robots! The associated short abstract describes considerations related to traversability uncertainty for long-duration rover navigation planning on remote planetary surfaces. Great work! Thanks to Moog for sponsoring the award!

Big congratulations to Ph.D. students Filip Marić and Matthew Giamou for winning the Best Workshop Contribution award at the IROS 2020 Workshop on Bringing Geometric Methods to Robot Learning, Optimization and Control, sponsored by the Bosch Centre for Artificial Intelligence!

Starting January 1, 2021, Prof. Kelly will serve as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s Robotics & Automation Magazine (RAM). The magazine has over 12,000 readers and is consistently listed by Thomson’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR) as one of the most highly ranked publication in both the Robotics (#7) and Automation & Control (#15) categories, with an impact factor of 4.250 in 2018 (5-years IF:4.816). The magazine publishes four issues per year: March, June, September and December.

New RA-L and IROS 2020 work with the RLAI Lab at the University of Alberta on learning robust latent dynamics from images only. We demonstrate how latent dynamics can be made more robust for real-world robotic applications by composing a Kalman filter with a learned, heteroskedastic uncertainty model. Watch the YouTube video to find out more!

Have you always wondered whether your extrinsic sensor transformation globally minimizes its calibration cost function? With our latest work on certifiable monocular hand-eye calibration, wonder no more! Check out the IEEE MFI 2020 paper – we prove that trajectories satisfying observability requirements lead to convex relaxations that are inherently stable to measurement error. The open source implementation of our method is fast, requires no calibration targets, and works for a wide variety of sensors, including monocular cameras!

Congratulations to lab members Valentin Peretroukhin and Matthew Giamou and to our collaborators, David M. Rosen, W. Nicholas Green, and Nicholas Roy at MIT for winning this year’s RSS Best Student Paper Award! Full details and code for the paper, “A Smooth Representation of SO(3) for Deep Rotation Learning with Uncertainty,” are available here. Great work all!

Just a couple of days until the RSS 2020 Workshop on Power-On-and-Go Robots: ‘Out of the Box’ Systems for Real-World Applications! We are extremely excited about the event, which will be streamed live via Zoom. Full details are available at https://www.power-on-and-go.net/.

The workshop will bring together researchers from diverse backgrounds to address topics related to power-on- and-go robots: robotic systems that are able to successfully deal with new situations fluidly and to adapt immediately to new environments or to changes in their own operating parameters. We have a fantastic lineup of speakers and panelists, including Hadas Kress-Gazit (Cornell), Stefan Leutenegger (Imperial College), Nathan Michael (CMU), Arne Sieverling (Realtime Robotics), Luca Carlone (MIT), Ali Agha (JPL), Dorsa Sadigh (Stanford), and Gaurav Sukhatme (USC)!

As a follow-on to the workshop, our Call for Papers for a special issue of the journal Autonomous Robots is out now as well, with more details and deadlines available here. We hope you will be able to join us for an insightful virtual event!

We are thrilled to announce that our paper on a smooth representation of belief over SO(3) for deep rotation learning will be presented at Robotics: Science and Systems 2020. This work was a collaboration between STARS lab members Valentin (now alumni!) and Matthew, together with Prof. Nicholas Roy, W. Nicholas Greene and Dr. David M. Rosen at MIT. Watch the 5 minute video summary below!

Several STARS lab members helped organize the Debates on the Future of Robotics Research workshop that was held (virtually) on Friday, June 5th as part of ICRA (2020). The workshop live stream received over 1100 unique viewers and was enthusiastically received by both participants and viewers! Congratulations to STARS students (and alumni) Matthew Giamou, Valentin Peretroukhin and Lee Clement, as well as Prof. Kelly, who helped organize the event!