Dr. Fei Gao, the co-director of ZJU Field Autonomous System and Computing Laboratory (ZJU FAST Lab), received Honorable Mention in the 2020 IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award for the paper “Teach-Repeat-Replan: A Complete and Robust System for Aggressive Flight in Complex Environments” as the first and corresponding author. This is the first time that a college or university of mainland China has won this honor as the first completion unit, and it is also the first time that IEEE-TRO has awarded this honor to a paper published in the field of unmanned aerial vehicles on IEEE-TRO.
This paper presents a complete solution towards robust aerial autonomy, enabling a drone to accomplish a complicated task with professional performance under merely rough human operations. The human operator may provide an arbitrarily slow or jerky trajectory with an expected topological structure. The system then autonomously converts this poor teaching trajectory to a topologically equivalent and local optimal one. The aggressiveness of the generated repeating motions is tunable, which can meet speed requirements ranging from drone racing to aerial filming. Moreover, during the repeating flight, the system locally observes environmental changes and replans safe trajectories to avoid moving obstacles. The proposed system extends the classical robotics teach-and-repeat framework and is named as Teach-Repeat-Replan.
By the time the news was released, this work had ranked among the top 50 popular articles in the IEEE-TRO database (ranked 14th) and received extensive attention and high praise from well-known scholars in the field of robotics. The editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Robotics and professor of Northwestern University Kevin Lynch (IEEE Fellow, the author of famous robotics textbooks such as Modern Robotics) commented on this best paper: “The T-RO editorial board was impressed by the theoretical and experimental contributions of your work.”
IEEE-TRO is the TOP journal in the field of robotics under IEEE, including research in all aspects of the robotics field. IEEE-TRO has extremely high requirements for the quality of papers, requiring work to have both significant theoretical and practical contributions to the field of robotics and can promote the development of the field. The “Fu Jingsun Best Paper Honor Award” is used to recognize the annual best publication of IEEE-TRO. Therefore, being able to publish papers in IEEE-TRO journals and at the same time receive the “Fu Jingsun Best Paper Honor Award” is an extremely high honor for all robot-related workers.
Related Links:
● Report Link from College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University
http://www.cse.zju.edu.cn/redir.php?catalog_id=1055601&object_id=1179075
● Paper Link
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9102390
● Code Link
https://github.com/HKUST-Aerial-Robotics/Teach-Repeat-Replan
● Video Link
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Fx411o78w?from=search&seid=4539658003138370390
● FAST Lab Link