Shih-Yun Lo, Shiqi Zhang, and Peter Stone are recipients of the 2018 Best Robotics Track Paper Award at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS). They received this award for their research on planning efficiently for task-level navigation in robots.

Their group, led by Texas Computer Science professor Peter Stone, includes Shih-Yun Lo, a Texas Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering, and Shiqi Zhang, a former Texas postdoc student and current Assistant Professor at SUNY Binghamton.

Task planning involves orienting the robot's actions around goals and subgoals and is especially challenging in large-scale indoor environments as it requires calculating the locations of people, objects, and their respective interactions within the environment. Optimal task planning will ensure that efficient assistive mobile robots are not a distant reality.

AAMAS brings together experts in the field of agent technology, providing a forum for both researchers and practitioners of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. This conference is the largest and most influential of its kind. Lo, Zhang, and Stone presented their research this past July in Stockholm, Sweden.