Jonathan and Lee traveled to Japan this week for the 2016 International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER) in Tokyo, where Lee presented his paper, “Improving Stereo Visual Odometry Using Visual Illumination Estimation”, to an enthusiastic crowd of robotics researchers from around the world. We had some great conversations over Japanese beer and fresh sushi, and took in the sights and sounds of Tokyo, narrowly avoiding a typhoon in the process. The next ISER is in Buenos Aires in 2018 — see you there!

Lee won one of six competitive travel grants to attend ISER, and has a cool certificate to prove it!

Lee presenting his paper with the help of some smooth animations.

Roboticists love silly photos.

A big welcome to four new Master’s students (Brandon, Oliver, Jordan, Trevor), and five new undergraduate thesis students (Christine, Johnny, Jennifer, Jason and Willie) who have joined STARS lab this September! Head over to our updated people page for bios and research blurbs.

Congratulations to Jacob Lambert (along with his co-authors Lee Clement, Matthew Giamou, and Jonathan) for winning the Best Student Paper at the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration for Intelligent Systems in Baded-Baden, Germany!

Lee Clement was also awarded a travel award to the 2016 International Symposium of Experimental Robotics in Tokyo, Japan where he is presenting a paper on improving visual odometry through sun detection. Congrats Lee and Jacob!

This weekend we drove over to the lovely University of Michigan campus to attend the workshops at RSS 2016. During the daytime, we listened to several heated exchanges about the future of hyper-parametric function approximation (i.e. Deep Learning) in robotics. During the night, we spent some time arguing over the best local Michigan brews. A great time all-around!

Lee and Valentin at RSS 2016.

The Deep Learning workshop at RSS 2016.

We visited MDA in Brampton, Ontario today for the 2016 Space Vision and Advanced Robotics Workshop. Jacob presented his work on entropy-based extrinsic sensor calibration, while Valentin talked about first responder localization using foot-mounted IMUs. We took home Second Prize (space pens!) in MDA’s Best Demo competition!

“Infrastructure-free First Responder Localization” won Second Prize in the Best Demo competition!

“Extrinsic Calibration of 2D Lidars Through Entropy Minimization”

Valentin presented his work on PROBE-GK: Predictive Robust Estimation using Generalized Kernels (in collaboration with the MIT RRG including Will Vega-Brown) at ICRA 2016 in Stockholm. A great turn out for the 3-minute spotlight talk, and lots of great questions at the interactive poster!

Valentin and Will (from Nick Roy’s group at MIT) at ICRA 2016.

Valentin presenting in the Visual-Based Navigation session.

We are grateful to NVIDIA for providing the lab with a state-of-the-art Titan X GPU. Looking forward to some cutting edge research on deep learning!

Congratulations to Valentin, who will be presenting “PROBE-GK: Predictive Robust Estimation using Gaussian Kernels” at ICRA 2016 in Stockholm, Sweden! See you there!

Congratulations to Lee and Valentin on receiving prestigious NSERC scholarships from the Government of Canada. Lee received the PGS-D3 and Valentin received the CGS-D3. Both excellent results!

Congratulations to Valentin and Lingzhu on their well-attended presentations at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems 2015 in Hamburg!

Lingzhu’s presentation on robust SLAM.

Valentin’s IROS presentation on PROBE.