News

Several Texas Robotics faculty and students presented papers, posters, and participated in workshops at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), held May 19–23 in Atlanta, Georgia.

ICRA is one of the world’s leading robotics conferences, bringing together researchers, engineers, and industry professionals to share breakthroughs and ideas in the interdisciplinary field of robotics.

This year, Texas Robotics made a strong showing with 29 accepted papers and participation in six workshops, placing the university among the top 20 institutions worldwide for the number of accepted papers.

Advanced Robotics Technologies for Surgery (ARTS) Lab

The ARTS Lab, led by Dr. Farshid Alambeigi, presented three papers focusing on advancements in surgical robotics. Graduate students Mobina Tavangarifard, Susheela Sharma, Omid Rezayof, and Daniyal Maroufi contributed to research on topics such as shape sensing of continuum manipulators and user experience in robotic-assisted surgical procedures

Robot Perception and Learning (RPL) Lab

Under the direction of Dr. Yuke Zhu, the RPL Lab had six papers accepted at ICRA 2025. Their research spanned areas including reinforcement learning, diffusion models for motion planning, and the integration of vision-language models for mobile manipulation. Notable works included "FLaRe: Achieving Masterful and Adaptive Robot Policies with Large-Scale Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning" and "DexMimicGen: Automated Data Generation for Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation via Imitation Learning."

Human-Centered Robotics Lab

Dr. Luis Sentis and his team contributed to research on whole-body control for humanoid robots. Their paper, "HOVER: Versatile Neural Whole-Body Controller for Humanoid Robots," introduced a neural control framework enabling dynamic and adaptive behaviors in complex environments.

Autonomous Mobile Robotics Lab

Led by Dr. Joydeep Biswas, this lab presented research on long-horizon spatio-temporal memory for robot navigation. The paper "ReMEmbR: Building and Reasoning Over Long-Horizon Spatio-Temporal Memory for Robot Navigation" addressed challenges in dynamic and partially observable environments.

Workshops and Collaborative Efforts

Texas Robotics faculty and students participated in several workshops, contributing to discussions on human-centered robot learning, contact-rich manipulation, social robot navigation, and more.

Three notable honors were awarded to Texas Robotics researchers:

• Dr. Yuke Zhu received the prestigious IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation, recognizing his groundbreaking contributions to robot learning and embodied artificial intelligence, and broadly used open-source software platforms for robot learning. 
• Dr. Mitch Pryor was recognized with an Outstanding Paper Award for “Let’s Talk about Language! Investigating Linguistic Diversity in Embodied AI Datasets,” presented during a workshop on language grounding for embodied agents. 
• Dr. Peter Stone and his team received the Best RoboCup-Themed Paper Award at the Roboletics 2.0 Workshop for “Reinforcement Learning Within the Classical Robotics Stack: A Case Study in Robot Soccer.” The paper introduces a novel hybrid architecture that blends reinforcement learning with classical robotics pipelines to tackle decision-making in partially observable, real-time, multi-agent scenarios like RoboCup soccer.