At RobotiXX lab, researchers (XX-Men) and robots (XX-Bots) perform robotics research at the intersection of motion planning and machine learning with a specific focus on robustly deployable field robotics. Our research goal is to develop highly capable and intelligent mobile robots that are robustly deployable in the real world with minimal human supervision. XX-Men have vast experience deploying XX-Bots to tackle real-world problems in the field, building advanced robot platforms, developing complex sensing and actuation systems, designing sophisticated motion planning algorithms, and setting up standardized testbeds and metrics in order to create highly capable and intelligent robots to locomote on land, in air, and at sea.
04/01/2025:Professor XX receives George Mason University College of Engineering and Computing 2025 Faculty Excellence Award for Research. [Award Plaque]
03/27/2025:Professor XX gave three invited talks, "Deployable Robots that Learn", at University of Colorado Boulder, University of Delaware, and University at Buffalo. Professor XX will also give a talk at New York University on May 6 2025.
12/01/2024: The RobotiXX lab will present three Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) papers at ICRA 2024! Congrats to all XX-Men and XX-Women! Thanks to all collaborators from UMD GAMMA! [Paper 1] [Paper 2] [Paper 3]
10/31/2024:Professor XX gave an invited talk, "Learning Planning and Control for Extreme Vehicle Mobility", at the 14th Workshop on Planning, Perception and Navigation for Intelligent Vehicles in IROS 2024! [Recording] [Workshop]
05/17/2024:Professor XX has been selected in the ICRA 2024 New Generation Star Project! [Certification]
04/30/2024:Professor XX gave an invited talk, "Learning Robot Navigation in Challenging Environments", at Center of Excellence in Command, Control, Communications, Computing, Cyber, and Intelligence (C5I Center) 35-Year Anniversary.
04/26/2024:Professor XX gave three invited talks, "Deployable Robots that Learn", at Virginia Tech (National Capital Region and Blacksburg) and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
03/29/2024:Professor XX gave an invited talk about Human-Interactive Mobile Robots at SoRAIM Winter School in Inria and University Grenoble Alpes in Grenoble, France! It was such a pleasant experience meeting European researchers in Social Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Multimedia in the lovely French city Grenoble! [Slides] [Recording]
02/01/2024: The RobotiXX lab will present six papers at ICRA 2024! Congrats to all XX-Men and XX-Women! Thanks to all collaborators from UT LARG and AMRL and UMD GAMMA! [Paper 1] [Paper 2] [Paper 3] [Paper 4] [Paper 5] [Paper 6]
09/15/2023: Congratulations to XX-ManDibyendu Das for being awarded the GMU IDIA Predoctoral Fellowship! Dibyendu will be focusing on developing motion memory techniques to leverage past planning experiences to accelerate future motion planning!
07/04/2023: Working on social robot navigation and wondering how to evaluate your research? Check out our paper "Principles and Guidelines for Evaluating Social Robot Navigation Algorithms"! [PDF] [Website]
03/27/2023: Our Multi-Modal Social Human Navigation Dataset (MuSoHu) is available on GMU Dataverse, which contains ~50 km, 10 hours, 150 trials, 7 humans of data in the wild and allows future robots to learn socially compliant navigation from humans, natural-born experts at such a task! [Website] [PDF] [Video] [Dataset] [Code] [Poster]
03/18/2023: Our XX-Man Amir and XX-Bot Go1 from the RobotiXX lab appear in ABC News Good Morning America featuring our Northern Virginia's congressman Don Beyer attending George Mason University to study AI at 72 years old! [ABC News]
03/06/2023: To empower conventional wheeled robots with capability to move through vertically challenging terrain (e.g., large boulders or fallen tree trunks), our Verti-Wheelers project is officially public! [Website] [PDF] [Video] [Datasets] [Code]
03/03/2023: Another Google AI Blog features our Performer-MPC, a 8.3M-parameter Transformer model with <10ms on-robot latency paired with Model Predictive Control, navigating robots in the real world! [Blog] [PDF] [Website] [Video]
02/14/2023: Our Performer-MPC, a 8.3M-parameter Transformer model with <10ms on-robot latency paired with Model Predictive Control, is mentioned by the Robotics@Google AI Blog! [Blog] [PDF] [Website] [Video]
10/21/2022:Professor XX will give two invited talks at two IROS 2022 workshops in Kyoto: "Evaluating Motion Planning "in-the-Loops"" at the Evaluating Motion Planning Performance workshop and "Learning Agile Ground Maneuvers in Highly Constrained and Off-Road Conditions" at the Agile Robotics: Perception, Learning, Planning, and Control workshop. [Workshop 1] [Workshop 2] [Tweet]
09/15/2022: Our new DynaBARN dataset, as a dynamic extension to our static BARN dataset, with 300 navigation environments with dynamic obstacles is accepted as a SSRR2021 paper and is available for use by the community. [PDF] [Website]
[Dataset] [Code]
03/01/2022: Our Socially CompliAnt Navigation Dataset (SCAND) consists of demonstrations for mobile robot social navigation collected on a wheeled and legged robot in the wild indoors and outdoors. [PDF] [Video] [Website] [Dataset]
06/01/2021: Future Prof.XX will be joining the faculty of Department of Computer Science at George Mason University in Fall 2022 as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. Future Professor XX is recruiting PhD students who are interested in robotics, motion planning, and machine learning. Drop me a line if you are interested in becoming one of the future XX-men. [Research Statement] [Hiring Flyer]
11/06/2020: Our Benchmark for Autonomous Robot Navigation (BARN) dataset with 300 navigation environments is presented at SSRR2020 and available for use by the community.
[Dataset] [PDF] [Video] [Presentation]
08/24/2020: We are organizing AAAI Spring Symposium "Machine Learning for Mobile Robot Navigation in the Wild" on March 22-24 2021 at Standord University in Palo Alto, CA, a 2.5-day symposium of talks, presentations, breakout sessions, and panel discussions, with actual mobile robots. Submissions are welcome.
[Website] [Newsletter]
