Alessio Xompero, PhD

Blog

See also my former WordPress site whataboutcomputervision for older blog posts.

IEEE RA-P Special Collection of "Autonomous Robotic Grasping and Manipulation in Real-World Applications"

15 January 2025 - Alessio Xompero

I am pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the Special Collection of "Autonomous Robotic Grasping and Manipulation in Real-World Applications" in IEEE Robotics and Automation Practice (IEEE RA-P).

This short blog post will give your a brief introduction to the new journal IEEE RA-P and provide the information about our Special Collection that follows on the 9th Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competition (RGMC), which was held in Yokohama (Japan), 14-16 May 2024, during the IEEE/RAS International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2024).

We are looking forward to receiving your submission!

IEEE Robotics and Automation Practice

The following text is taken and partially adapted from the RA-P website.

Robotics and Automation Practice (RA-P) is a new IEEE/RAS journal, launched in December 2024, that seeks to publish applied research by or explicitly directed toward practitioners, with results demonstrated or deployed in real-world settings and applications. Such results include algorithms, code, methodologies, data sets, and designs that clearly demonstrate either verifiable and replicable improvements over the state of the art or a new practical application within the broad context of robotics and automation. Also, insights and experiments previously described in patents might be relevant content to bring to the community. The journal may include empirical studies, in-depth case studies, and other experimental works that contribute to the latest body of knowledge in robotics and automation engineering.

RA-P differs from the scope and editorial policies of the other RAS periodicals: IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE), IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), and IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine (RA-M). Specifically, RA-P papers focus on successful application, technical, and business relevance of an idea to industry.

The distinguishing factors of RA-P are

a short paper format (maximum of four pages plus one page for references),
extensive supplementary materials that will include artifacts that are useful to the practitioner*,
an emphasis on reproducibility of the results,
a review process that emphasizes practical impact on robotics technology over scientific novelty.

*Supplementary material of up to 900 MB can be code, data sets, video content, CAD files, or any supplementary material that will help readers and the robotics community.

Call for Papers

In a time when we see a large number of novel solutions published everyday for robotic grasping and manipulation, it has been a common confusion that we do not know which solutions are yet only excellent in specific lab settings or even only in simulations, and which are robustly ready for real-world deployment. In this special collection, we are interested in soliciting papers that emphasize addressing real-world problems with real-world solutions.

As such, we expect the submissions to be able to show and justify their real-world performance through solid benchmarking efforts, extensive and challenging experiments, or potentially real-world competitions in international conferences such as those organized in IEEE-RAS ICRA and IEEE/RSJ IROS.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Robot Assembly
Robot Manufacturing
Grasping
Cloth Manipulation
In-Hand Manipulation
Picking in Clutter
Human-to-Robot Handovers
Nonprehensile Manipulation
Dual-Arm Manipulation

Important dates

The deadline of submission is April 1, 2025.

Submission guidelines

Submissions will undergo the RA-P review process as is set up by the Editorial Board.
The submissions will be reviewed on a first-come first-served rolling basis.

Guest editors

Yu Sun, University of South Florida
Berk Calli, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Kenny Kimble, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Francis Wyffels, Ghent University
Kaiyu Hang, Rice University
Salvatore D'Avella, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna
Alessio Xompero, Queen Mary University of London
Andrea Cavallaro, Idiap Research Institue and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Maximo A. Roa, German Aerospace Center
Peter So, Technical University of Munich

Outstanding Reviewer at ECCV 2024

28 September 2024 - Alessio Xompero

Glad to announce that this week I was selected as one of the Outstanding Reviewers out of 7,293 reviewers at the 2024 European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)!

This was my first time as a reviewer for this conference. I am grateful to the organising committee for the invitation and honoured for this recognition.
Congratulations also to all other outstanding reviewers!

I am also happy to see that this recognition follows the one I received at the 2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in June, where I was also a first-time reviewer for the conference.

I believe that writing high-quality reviews and providing constructive feedback is a service to help and ensure the dissemination of research works that are relevant, impactful, and clear to readers in the community.

Some papers are ready for publication and presentation, and hence deserve a clear acknowledgement as a feedback. Other papers are in most of the cases not yet ready for publication and the feedback should clearly signal this while mentioning any strengths.

Glad that I could contribute to both conferences in a positive way, and I wish the authors, who did not get their papers presented at these conferences, the opportunity to improve their work for next event!