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 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!
September 3, 2025
We are excited to announce that a team of researchers led by Dr. Xie, including Dr. Lauren Brzozowski, Dr. Jiang Biao He, and Dr. Hongkai Yu, has been awarded a prestigious grant from the National Science Foundation’s Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) program. The funded project, titled "CPS: Medium: An Autonomous Robotic System for Precision and High-Throughput Tomato Phenotyping in Large Scale Greenhouses", aims to automate plant phenotyping through innovative research in robotics, computer vision, and power electronics. The proposed autonomous robotic phenotyping system stands out for its innovative integration of domain knowledge to enhance phenotyping precision, its adaptability to meet the specific needs of greenhouse managers, and its capacity to optimize robot motion using feedback from phenotyping results. This interdisciplinary effort tackles key challenges at the intersection of embodied intelligence for agricultural robots, promising transformative advances in high-throughput, intelligent plant phenotyping. Congratulations to the research team on this significant achievement!
September 3, 2025
We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Xie has been awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. This highly competitive honor recognizes early-career faculty who demonstrate exceptional promise in both research and education. Dr. Xie’s project, titled "CAREER: Safe and Reliable Human-Robot Shared Control for Robotic Telemanipulation in Complex and Extreme Environments", focuses on improving the safety, reliability, and user-friendliness of robotic telemanipulation in complex and extreme environments by integrating manual teleoperation with autonomous control in an intelligent manner. The award will support Dr. Xie’s innovative work over the next five years, helping to advance knowledge in robot shared control and motion planning while also engaging students and the community through K12 outreach and undergraduate research activities.
