Carnegie Mellon University researchers from the School of Computer Science won the Best Industrial Robotics Research Paper Award at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023).

The paper, "Toward Closed-Loop Additive Manufacturing: Paradigm Shift in Fabrication, Inspection and Repair" aims to introduce in situ monitoring and the repair of geometric defects into the additive manufacturing process.

The team conducted three experiments on parts with manually induced defects to investigate the system's ability to repair them. Comparing the defective and repaired parts, the researchers observed a reduction in defect percent by volume, an improvement in geometric tolerance and an increase in the part's breaking load.

The paper's authors included Lu Li, Howie Choset, Albert Xu and Archit Rungta of the Robotics Institute (RI); and Manpreet Singh, Fujun Ruan, Yuchen Wu, Luyuan Wang and Kevin Song from the College of Engineering.

Two papers were also finalists for the Best Paper Award on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics. RI faculty, staff and students including Choset, Andrew Orekhov and Matthew Travers contributed to "EELS: Towards Autonomous Mobility in Extreme Environments With a Novel Large-Scale Screw Driven Snake Robot." The work is part of a collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Arizona State University and the University of California, San Diego. The RI's Zachary Manchester also led a team of engineering students in writing "Multi-IMU Proprioceptive Odometry for Legged Robots."

IROS, among the largest robotics conferences with more than 4,000 attendees this year, was held Oct. 1–5 in Detroit.