Allison Okamura, Somil Bansal, Karen Liu, and Mac Schwager are Recognized at 2026 ICRA

The SRC is pleased to congratulate Allison Okamura, Somil Bansal, Karen Liu, and Mac Schwager on the recognition they received at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation in Vienna, Austria!

Allison Okamura has been awarded the Robotics Medal. The Robotics Medal recipient was selected by a committee of robotics experts led by MassRobotics. The medal celebrates the important role of women in shaping the future through robotics. The award is given based on the recipient’s achievements and impact on the field of robotics, including the significance, depth, and originality of their technical contributions.

In recognition of his outstanding accomplishments and service to RAS and the robotics and automation community, Somil Bansal received the Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation for pioneering scalable algorithms for safety-critical control of autonomous and AI-enabled robotic systems.

Karen Liu and her student, Zhen Wu, received not one but two awards: the Best Paper Award on Robot Manipulation and Locomotion and the Best Conference Paper Award. Their paper is titled “OmniRetarget: Interaction-Preserving Data Generation for Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation and Scene Interaction.” The Best Conference Paper Award is judged based on technical merit, originality, potential impact on the field, clarity of the written paper, and quality of the conference presentation.

Qianzhong Chen, advised by Mac Schwager, was honored with an RA-L Best Paper Award for 2025 for his paper “GRaD-Nav++ : Vision-language Model Enabled Visual Drone Navigation With Gaussian Radiance Fields and Differentiable Dynamics.” Additionally, Allison Okamura and her students (first author,Nam Gyun Kim) received the RA-L Best Paper Award for 2025 for their paper "Inflatable-Structure-Based Working-Channel Securing Mechanism for Soft Growing Robots." The IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) Best Paper Award recognizes top publications from the previous year, highlighting outstanding contributions to the robotics and automation community.