Mingwei Lai and Yuqian Ye Win the Best Paper Award Finalist at ICRA 2025
Congratulations to Mingwei Lai and Yuqian Ye for winning the Best Paper Award Finalist at 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation for their novel design of “TrofyBot”.
Terrestrial and aerial bimodal vehicles have gained significant interest due to their energy efficiency and versatile maneuverability across different domains. However, most existing passive-wheeled bimodal vehicles rely on attitude regulation to generate forward thrust, which inevitably results in energy waste on producing lifting force. In this work, we propose a novel passive-wheeled bimodal vehicle called TrofyBot that can rapidly change the thrust direction with a single servo motor and a transformable parallelogram linkage mechanism (TPLM). Cooperating with a bidirectional force generation module (BFGM) for motors to produce bidirectional thrust, the robot achieves flexible mobility as a differential driven rover on the ground. This design achieves 95.37% energy saving efficiency in terrestrial locomotion, allowing the robot continuously move on the ground for more than two hours in current setup. Furthermore, the design obviates the need for attitude regulation and therefore provides a stable sensor field of view (FoV). We model the bimodal dynamics for the system, analyze its differential flatness property, and design a controller based on hybrid model predictive control for trajectory tracking. A prototype is built and extensive experiments are conducted to verify the design and the proposed controller, which achieves high energy efficiency and seamless transition between modes.
As the world’s top robotics conference, ICRA 2025 (hosted by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society) drew thousands of global experts, focusing on AI-driven robotics, human-robot interaction, and sustainable automation. Lai’s paper stood out among hundreds of submissions, selected via rigorous peer review for technical excellence, originality, and impact on robotics advancement.