In a closed-door discussion that I attended recently, the award committee was debating whether to award the best student paper to a reinforcement learning-based robotics work with simulations using open datasets, or a robotics work using more traditional model-based methods with real robot experiments. Much more deliberation took place to reach the decision, and I’m not going … [Read more...] about When Robots Meet Artificial Intelligence: Let’s Do Better to Gain People’s Trust [From the Editor’s Desk]
Past Columns/ Departments
Anniversaries Are a Good Time to Reflect on the Past, Present, and Future of Robotics and Automation [President’s Message]
This month, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) will celebrate 40 years of its flagship conference, the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), with a special edition named ICRA@40 . This unique event will be held from 23 to 26 September 2024 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10673755 For the open access … [Read more...] about Anniversaries Are a Good Time to Reflect on the Past, Present, and Future of Robotics and Automation [President’s Message]
Distributed Optimization Methods for Multi-Robot Systems: Part 1—A Tutorial [Tutorial]
Distributed optimization provides a framework for deriving distributed algorithms for a variety of multi-robot problems. This tutorial constitutes the first part of a two-part series on distributed optimization applied to multi-robot problems, which seeks to advance the application of distributed optimization in robotics. In this tutorial, we demonstrate that many canonical … [Read more...] about Distributed Optimization Methods for Multi-Robot Systems: Part 1—A Tutorial [Tutorial]
Visual Place Recognition: A Tutorial [Tutorial]
Localization is an essential capability for mobile robots, enabling them to build a comprehensive representation of their environment and interact with the environment effectively toward a goal. A rapidly growing field of research in this area is visual place recognition (VPR), which is the ability to recognize previously seen places in the world based solely on images. For … [Read more...] about Visual Place Recognition: A Tutorial [Tutorial]
Distributed Optimization Methods for Multi-Robot Systems: Part 2—A Survey
Although the field of distributed optimization is well developed, relevant literature focused on the application of distributed optimization to multi-robot problems is limited. This survey constitutes the second part of a two-part series on distributed optimization applied to multi-robot problems. In this article, we survey three main classes of distributed optimization … [Read more...] about Distributed Optimization Methods for Multi-Robot Systems: Part 2—A Survey