Welcome to the Intelligent Robotic Arms (IRA) Lab in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Kentucky. Our lab focuses on research in kinematically redundant robots, fault-tolerant robots, motion planning, and human-robot interaction. We develop advanced motion planning algorithms to generate safe, reliable, and agile motion for robotic arms across a variety of applications, including space and ocean exploration, nuclear industry, manufacturing, daily assistance, and smart agriculture.
September 17, 2025
Excited to share that I have been appointed the Robley D. Evans Faculty Fellow in Electrical Engineering, effective July 1, 2025.
I’m deeply grateful for the generous support from the UK College of Engineering and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. This recognition is a great honor, and I look forward to continuing my contributions to the academic community while striving for even greater professional impact.
September 12, 2025
Dr. Xie serves as the associate editor of the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), June 1-5, 2026, in Vienna, Austria.
September 3, 2025
Our paper, titled "Plan Optimal Collision-Free Trajectories with Non-Convex Cost Functions Using Graphs of Convex Sets," has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics.
This TRO paper develops a new motion planner called the GCSGC planner to compute low-cost and collision-free trajectories for non-convex cost functions. This planner is created by building a graph structure whose vertices and edges are obtained by intersecting a set of collision-free regions with a set of linear-cost regions obtained from a ReLU neural network used to approximate the non-convex cost function. A graph pre-processing technique is then developed to improve the efficiency of the planner and the quality of the computed trajectories.
The first author, Landon Clark, will present this TRO paper at ICRA 2026 held in Vienna, Austria. Huge congrats to Landon on his second TRO paper!
