The research team of Prof. SHEN Shaojie from the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering (ECE) has won the IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award for their paper titled “RACER: Rapid Collaborative Exploration with a Decentralized Multi-UAV System”. The prestigious award recognizes the best paper published annually in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

Their paper, featured in the June 2023 issue of IEEE Transactions on Robotics (Volume 39, Issue 3, Pages 1816-1835), outlines the RACER system, which is a revolutionary framework for enhancing collaborative unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) missions through a decentralized approach.

The paper was authored by Prof. Shen and his two former PhD students, Dr. ZHOU Boyu (first author) and Dr. XU Hao. Dr. Zhou was supervised by Prof. Shen during 2018-2022 and is currently Assistant Professor at Sun Yat-sen University. Dr. Xu completed his PhD degree in 2023.

The award will be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024, to take place in Yokohama, Japan on May 13-17, 2024.

Previously, Prof. Shen’s research group has received Honorable Mention in IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award twice for their papers on “VINS-Mono: A Robust and Versatile Monocular Visual-Inertial State Estimator”(2018) and “Teach-Repeat-Replan: A Complete and Robust System for Aggressive Flight in Complex Environments” (2020).