Congratulations to the #ICRA2025 best paper award winners

The 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) best paper winners and finalists in the various different categories have been announced. The recipients were revealed during an award ceremony at the conference, which took place from 19-23 May in Atlanta, USA.

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award on Robot Learning

Winner

• *Robo-DM: Data Management for Large Robot Datasets, Kaiyuan Chen, Letian Fu, David Huang, Yanxiang Zhang, Yunliang Lawrence Chen, Huang Huang, Kush Hari, Ashwin Balakrishna, Ted Xiao, Pannag Sanketi, John Kubiatowicz, Ken Goldberg

Finalists

• Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis, David D’Ambrosio, Saminda Wishwajith Abeyruwan, Laura Graesser, Atil Iscen, Heni Ben Amor, Alex Bewley, Barney J. Reed, Krista Reymann, Leila Takayama, Yuval Tassa, Krysztof Choromanski, Erwin Coumans, Deepali Jain, Navdeep Jaitly, Natasha Jaques, Satoshi Kataoka, Yuheng Kuang, Nevena Lazic, Reza, Mahjourian, Sherry Moore, Kenneth Oslund, Anish Shankar, Vikas Sindhwani, Vincent Vanhoucke, Grace Vesom, Peng Xu, Pannag Sanketi
• *No Plan but Everything under Control: Robustly Solving Sequential Tasks with Dynamically Composed Gradient Descent, Vito Mengers, Oliver Brock

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award in Field and Service Robotics

Winner

• *PolyTouch: A Robust Multi-Modal Tactile Sensor for Contact-Rich Manipulation Using Tactile-Diffusion Policies, Jialiang Zhao, Naveen Kuppuswamy, Siyuan Feng, Benjamin Burchfiel, Edward Adelson

Finalists

• A New Stereo Fisheye Event Camera for Fast Drone Detection and Tracking, Daniel Rodrigues Da Costa, Maxime Robic, Pascal Vasseur, Fabio Morbidi
• *Learning-Based Adaptive Navigation for Scalar Field Mapping and Feature Tracking, Jose Fuentes, Paulo Padrao, Abdullah Al Redwan Newaz, Leonardo Bobadilla

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award on Human-Robot Interaction

Winner

• *Human-Agent Joint Learning for Efficient Robot Manipulation Skill Acquisition, Shengchent Luo, Quanuan Peng, Jun Lv, Kaiwen Hong, Katherin Driggs-Campbell, Cewu Lu, Yong-Lu Li

Finalists

• *To Ask or Not to Ask: Human-In-The-Loop Contextual Bandits with Applications in Robot-Assisted Feeding, Rohan Banerjee, Rajat Kumar Jenamani, Sidharth Vasudev, Amal Nanavati, Katherine Dimitropoulou, Sarah Dean, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee
• *Point and Go: Intuitive Reference Frame Reallocation in Mode Switching for Assistive Robotics, Allie Wang, Chen Jiang, Michael Przystupa, Justin Valentine, Martin Jagersand

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award on Mechanisms and Design

Winner

• Individual and Collective Behaviors in Soft Robot Worms Inspired by Living Worm Blobs, Carina Kaeser, Junghan Kwon, Elio Challita, Harry Tuazon, Robert Wood, Saad Bhamla, Justin Werfel

Finalists

• *Informed Repurposing of Quadruped Legs for New Tasks, Fuchen Chen, Daniel Aukes
• *Intelligent Self-Healing Artificial Muscle: Mechanisms for Damage Detection and Autonomous, Ethan Krings, Patrick Mcmanigal, Eric Markvicka

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award on Planning and Control

Winner

• *No Plan but Everything under Control: Robustly Solving Sequential Tasks with Dynamically Composed Gradient Descent, Vito Mengers, Oliver Brock

Finalists

• *SELP: Generating Safe and Efficient Task Plans for Robot Agents with Large Language Models, Yi Wu, Zikang Xiong, Yiran Hu, Shreyash Sridhar Iyengar, Nan Jiang, Aniket Bera, Lin Tan, Suresh Jagannathan
• *Marginalizing and Conditioning Gaussians Onto Linear Approximations of Smooth Manifolds with Applications in Robotics, Zi Cong Guo, James Richard Forbes, Timothy Barfoot

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award in Robot Perception

Winner

• *MAC-VO: Metrics-Aware Covariance for Learning-Based Stereo Visual Odometry, Yuheng Qju, Yutian Chen, Zihao Zhang, Wenshan Wang, Sebastian Scherer

Finalists

• *Ground-Optimized 4D Radar-Inertial Odometry Via Continuous Velocity Integration Using Gaussian Process, Wooseong Yang, Hyesu Jang, Ayoung Kim
• *UAD: Unsupervised Affordance Distillation for Generalization in Robotic Manipulation, Yihe Tang, Wenlong Huang, Yingke Wang, Chengshu Li, Roy Yuan, Ruohan Zhang, Jiajun Wu, Li Fei-Fei

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award in Robot Manipulation and Locomotion

Winner

• *D(R, O) Grasp: A Unified Representation of Robot and Object Interaction for Cross-Embodiment Dexterous Grasping, Zhenyu Wei, Zhixuan Xu, Jingxiang Guo, Yiwen Hou, Chongkai Gao, Zhehao Cai, Jiayu Luo, Lin Shao

Finalists

• *Full-Order Sampling-Based MPC for Torque-Level Locomotion Control Via Diffusion-Style Annealing, Haoru Xue, Chaoyi Pan, Zeji Yi, Guannan Qu, Guanya Shi
• *TrofyBot: A Transformable Rolling and Flying Robot with High Energy Efficiency, Mingwei Lai, Yugian Ye, Hanyu Wu, Chice Xuan, Ruibin Zhang, Qiuyu Ren, Chao Xu, Fei Gao, Yanjun Cao

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award in Automation

Winner

• *Physics-Aware Robotic Palletization with Online Masking Inference, Tiangi Zhang, Zheng Wu, Yuxin Chen, Yixiao Wang, Boyuan Liang, Scott Moura, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Mingyu Ding, Wei Zhan

Finalists

• *In-Plane Manipulation of Soft Micro-Fiber with Ultrasonic Transducer Array and Microscope, Jieyun Zou, Siyuan An, Mingyue Wang, Jiaqi Li, Yalin Shi, You-Fu Li, Song Liu
• *A Complete and Bounded-Suboptimal Algorithm for a Moving Target Traveling Salesman Problem with Obstacles in 3D, Anoop Bhat, Geordan Gutow, Bhaskhar Vundurthy, Zhonggiang, Sivakumar Rathinam, Howie Choset

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award in Medical Robotics

Winner

• *In-Vivo Tendon-Driven Rodent Ankle Exoskeleton System for Sensorimotor Rehabilitation, Juwan Han, Seunghyeon Park, Keehon Kim

Finalists

• *Image-Based Compliance Control for Robotic Steering of a Ferromagnetic Guidewire, An Hu, Chen Sun, Adam Dmytriw, Nan Xiao, Yu Sun
• *AutoPeel: Adhesion-Aware Safe Peeling Trajectory Optimization for Robotic Wound Care, Xiao Liang, Youcheng Zhang, Fei Liu, Florian Richter, Michael C. Yip

IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award on Multi-Robot Systems

Winner

• *Deploying Ten Thousand Robots: Scalable Imitation Learning for Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding, He Jiang, Yutong Wang, Rishi Veerapaneni, Tanishq Harish Duhan, Guillaume Adrien Sartoretti, Jiaoyang Li

Finalists

• Distributed Multi-Robot Source Seeking in Unknown Environments with Unknown Number of Sources, Lingpeng Chen, Siva Kailas, Srujan Deolasee, Wenhao Luo, Katia Sycara, Woojun Kim
• *Multi-Nonholonomic Robot Object Transportation with Obstacle Crossing Using a Deformable Sheet, Weijian Zhang, Charlie Street, Masoumeh Mansouri

IEEE ICRA Best Conference Paper Award

Winners

• *Marginalizing and Conditioning Gaussians Onto Linear Approximations of Smooth Manifolds with Applications in Robotics, Zi Cong Guo, James Richard Forbes, Timothy Barfoot
• *MAC-VO: Metrics-Aware Covariance for Learning-Based Stereo Visual Odometry, Yuheng Qju, Yutian Chen, Zihao Zhang, Wenshan Wang, Sebastian Scherer

In addition to the papers listed above, these paper were also finalists for the IEEE ICRA Best Conference Paper Award.

Finalists

• *MiniVLN: Efficient Vision-And-Language Navigation by Progressive Knowledge Distillation, Junyou Zhu, Yanyuan Qiao, Siqi Zhang, Xingjian He, Qi Wu, Jing Liu
• *RoboCrowd: Scaling Robot Data Collection through Crowdsourcing, Suvir Mirchandani, David D. Yuan, Kaylee Burns, Md Sazzad Islam, Zihao Zhao, Chelsea Finn, Dorsa Sadigh
• How Sound-Based Robot Communication Impacts Perceptions of Robotic Failure, Jai’La Lee Crider, Rhian Preston, Naomi T. Fitter
• *Obstacle-Avoidant Leader Following with a Quadruped Robot, Carmen Scheidemann, Lennart Werner, Victor Reijgwart, Andrei Cramariuc, Joris Chomarat, Jia-Ruei Chiu, Roland Siegwart, Marco Hutter
• *Dynamic Tube MPC: Learning Error Dynamics with Massively Parallel Simulation for Robust Safety in Practice, William Compton, Noel Csomay-Shanklin, Cole Johnson, Aaron Ames
• *Bat-VUFN: Bat-Inspired Visual-And-Ultrasound Fusion Network for Robust Perception in Adverse Conditions, Gyeongrok Lim, Jeong-ui Hong, Min Hyeon Bae
• *TinySense: A Lighter Weight and More Power-Efficient Avionics System for Flying Insect-Scale Robots, Zhitao Yu, Josh Tran, Claire Li, Aaron Weber, Yash P. Talwekar, Sawyer Fuller
• *TSCLIP: Robust CLIP Fine-Tuning for Worldwide Cross-Regional Traffic Sign Recognition, Guoyang Zhao, Fulong Ma, Weiging Qi, Chenguang Zhang, Yuxuan Liu, Ming Liu, Jun Ma
• *Geometric Design and Gait Co-Optimization for Soft Continuum Robots Swimming at Low and High Reynolds Numbers, Yanhao Yang, Ross Hatton
• *ShadowTac: Dense Measurement of Shear and Normal Deformation of a Tactile Membrane from Colored Shadows, Giuseppe Vitrani, Basile Pasquale, Michael Wiertlewski
• *Occlusion-aware 6D Pose Estimation with Depth-guided Graph Encoding and Cross-semantic Fusion for Robotic Grasping, Jingyang Liu, Zhenyu Lu, Lu Chen, Jing Yang, Chenguang Yang
• *Stable Tracking of Eye Gaze Direction During Ophthalmic Surgery, Tinghe Hong, Shenlin Cai, Boyang Li, Kai Huang
• *Configuration-Adaptive Visual Relative Localization for Spherical Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robots, Yuming Liu, Qiu Zheng, Yuxiao Tu, Yuan Gao, Guanqi Liang, Tin Lun Lam
• *Realm: Real-Time Line-Of-Sight Maintenance in Multi-Robot Navigation with Unknown Obstacles, Ruofei Bai, Shenghai Yuan, Kun Li, Hongliang Guo, Wei-Yun Yau, Lihua Xie

IEEE ICRA Best Student Paper Award

Winners

• *Deploying Ten Thousand Robots: Scalable Imitation Learning for Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding, He Jiang, Yutong Wang, Rishi Veerapaneni, Tanishq Harish Duhan, Guillaume Adrien Sartoretti, Jiaoyang Li
• *ShadowTac: Dense Measurement of Shear and Normal Deformation of a Tactile Membrane from Colored Shadows, Giuseppe Vitrani, Basile Pasquale, Michael Wiertlewski
• *Point and Go: Intuitive Reference Frame Reallocation in Mode Switching for Assistive Robotics, Allie Wang, Chen Jiang, Michael Przystupa, Justin Valentine, Martin Jagersand
• *TinySense: A Lighter Weight and More Power-Efficient Avionics System for Flying Insect-Scale Robots, Zhitao Yu, Josh Tran, Claire Li, Aaron Weber, Yash P. Talwekar, Sawyer Fuller

Note: papers with an * were eligible for the IEEE ICRA Best Student Paper Award.