School of Engineering professors, students and alumni were recognized with three awards at the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, the flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. Held in Montreal, Canada on May 20-24, the conference was attended by over 4,000 global participants and received close to 3,000 submissions of high-quality papers from around the world.

Prof. LI Zexiang, Electronic and Computer Engineering, and alumnus Frank WANG, Founder and CEO of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) industry leader DJI, were honored with the 2019 IEEE Robotics and Automation Award for “contributions to the development and commercialization of civilian drones, aerial imaging technology, robotics engineering advancement, innovation, and entrepreneurship”. The accolade is an IEEE Technical Field Award and is among the highest-level awards given by IEEE. Frank received his BEng and MPhil degrees at HKUST in 2006 and 2011 respectively. During his studies at HKUST, he started to design UAV with the assistance of his supervisor Prof. Li. He founded DJI in 2006, which has gone on to become a world leader in commercial and civilian drone industry.

Prof. SEO Jungwon, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (MAE) and Electronic & Computer Engineering (ECE), and ECE MPhil student KIM Chung-Hee gained the Best Paper Award in Robot Manipulation for their paper entitled “Shallow-Depth Insertion: Peg in Shallow Hole through Robotic In-Hand Manipulation” (Video demo). The paper features a dexterous robotic manipulation technique that can facilitate challenging part insertion/assembly tasks. Chung-Hee obtained his BEng in Mechanical Engineering at HKUST in 2018 before beginning his postgraduate studies at ECE.

Prof. SHEN Shaojie, Electronic and Computer Engineering, and his PhD students LI Peiliang and QIN Tong received an Honorable Mention in IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award for their paper on “VINS-Mono: A Robust and Versatile Monocular Visual-Inertial State Estimator”.