Tomáš Votroubek has been awarded the prestigious AIC Best Student Paper Award for his innovative research on globally optimal inverse kinematics in robotics. His work, published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, introduces a new optimization technique with the potential to revolutionize robot design and control.
A groundbreaking paper on robotics and optimization, "Globally Optimal Inverse Kinematics as a Non-Convex Quadratically Constrained Quadratic Program," has earned Tomáš Votroubek, under the supervision of Tomáš Kroupa, the 2024 AIC Best Student Paper Award. This prestigious award recognizes exceptional research published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
The AIC Best Student Paper Award recognizes exceptional research and innovation among student authors contributing to the field of artificial intelligence. This annual accolade is awarded based on the quality, originality, and impact of the work, as well as its potential to advance AI research and applications.
To elaborate further, according to the award committee, Tomáš Votroubek and Tomáš Kroupa’s paper addresses the longstanding challenge of solving inverse kinematics—a fundamental problem in robotics that involves determining joint configurations to achieve a desired end-effector position. The paper’s key contribution is a global optimization technique for inverse kinematics using non-convex quadratically constrained quadratic programming.
The authors demonstrate that, in practice, it is faster to solve the polynomial problem of inverse kinematics using branch-and-bound than with the theoretically optimal sum-of-squares hierarchies. The new technique enables the practical computation of globally optimal joint configurations for generic robots even with ten revolute joints.
Congratulations to Tomáš Votroubek on this remarkable achievement! His work exemplifies the cutting-edge research supported by the AIC and highlights the potential of global optimization techniques to revolutionize robotics and automation.
