George Mason robotics team showcases nine pioneering studies at international conference

George Mason roboticists Xuesu Xiao, Xuan Wang, Daigo Shishika, and Gregory Stein presented nine papers at the 2024 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024) hosted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Robotics Society of Japan last month.  

“Thanks to the hard work of our students and the support of our collaborators, we were able to present our research internationally at IROS 2024,” said Xuan Wang, who received the New Generation Star award at the conference, sponsored by Nokov, which he called, “a great encouragement for my career.” 

“A few papers resulted from a joint project across George Mason’s departments of mechanical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science, funded by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Tactical Behaviors for Autonomous Maneuver (TBAM) Collaborative Research Alliance (CRA),” said Xuesu Xiao. 

The papers presented were as follows: 

Active Information Gathering for Long-Horizon Navigation Under Uncertainty by Predicting the Value of Information 

Authors: Raihan Islam Arnob and Gregory Stein. 

Learning-informed Long-Horizon Navigation under Uncertainty for Vehicles with Dynamics 

 Authors: Abhish Khanal, Hoang-Dung Bui, Erion Plaku, and Gregory Stein 

VANP: Learning Where to See for Navigation with Self-Supervised Vision-Action Pre-Training 

Authors: Mohammad Nazeri, Junzhe Wang, Amirreza Payandeh, and Xuesu Xiao  

DTG: Diffusion-based Trajectory Generation for Mapless Global Navigation 

Author: Jing Liang, Amirreza Payandeh, Daeun Song, Xuesu Xiao, Dinesh Manocha  

Bi-CL: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robots Coordination Through Bi-level Optimization 

Authors: Zechen Hu, Daigo Shishika, Xuesu Xiao, Xuan Wang  

Learning Coordinated Maneuver in Adversarial Environments 

Authors: Zechen Hu, Manshi Limbu, Daigo Shishika, Xuesu Xiao, Xuan Wang  

Team Coordination on Graphs: Problem, Analysis, and Algorithms 

Authors: Yanlin Zhou, Manshi Limbu, Gregory Stein, Xuan Wang, Daigo Shishika, Xuesu Xiao 

Terrain-Attentive Learning for Efficient 6-DoF Kinodynamic Modeling on Vertically Challenging Terrain 

Authors: Aniket Datar, Chenhui Pan, Mohammad Nazeri, Anuj Pokhrel, Xuesu Xiao  

D3G: Learning Multi-robot Coordination from Demonstrations 

Authors: Yizhi Zhou, Wanxin Jin, Xuan Wang