Coarobo GK Founder Receives 13th Advanced Robotics Best Paper Award at RSJ 2025

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Coarobo GK Founder Receives 13th Advanced Robotics Best Paper Award at RSJ 2025

Tokyo, JapanSeptember 4, 2025

Coarobo GK is pleased to announce that a co-authored research paper involving its President & Founder, Lotfi El Hafi, received the 13th Advanced Robotics Best Paper Award from the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ) . The award was conferred during the 43rd Annual Conference of the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ 2025), held at the Institute of Science Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, on September 4, 2025. The award recognizes outstanding papers published in Advanced Robotics (AR) , an international peer-reviewed journal published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of RSJ.

The award-winning paper, titled "Active Exploration based on Information Gain by Particle Filter for Efficient Spatial Concept Formation" , was co-authored by Akira Taniguchi, Yoshiki Tabuchi, Tomochika Ishikawa, Lotfi El Hafi, Yoshinobu Hagiwara, and Tadahiro Taniguchi, in collaboration with Ritsumeikan University. The study proposes an active inference method, named spatial concept formation with information gain-based active exploration (SpCoAE), that combines sequential Bayesian inference using particle filters with information-gain-based destination determination, enabling mobile robots to learn spatial concepts through autonomous active exploration.

Receiving this award two years after the paper's publication is a meaningful reminder that fundamental research takes time to be evaluated and adopted. We are grateful to the Robotics Society of Japan for this recognition, and to our co-authors at Ritsumeikan University for their continued dedication to this line of research.

Lotfi El Hafi, President & Founder of Coarobo GK

Coarobo GK extends its sincere appreciation to the RSJ, all co-authors, and the supporting institutions for this recognition.

Citation

A. Taniguchi, Y. Tabuchi, T. Ishikawa, L. El Hafi, Y. Hagiwara, and T. Taniguchi, โ€œActive Exploration based on Information Gain by Particle Filter for Efficient Spatial Concept Formation,โ€ in RSJ Advanced Robotics (AR), Special Issue on World Models and Predictive Coding in Robotics (Part I), vol. 37, no. 13, pp. 840-870, Jul. 3, 2023. DOI: 10.1080/01691864.2023.2225175

Abstract

"Autonomous robots need to learn the categories of various places by exploring their environments and interacting with users. However, preparing training datasets with linguistic instructions from users is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Moreover, effective exploration is essential for appropriate concept formation and rapid environmental coverage. To address this issue, we propose an active inference method, referred to as spatial concept formation with information gain-based active exploration (SpCoAE) that combines sequential Bayesian inference using particle filters and information gain-based destination determination in a probabilistic generative model. This study interprets the robot's action as a selection of destinations to ask the user, 'What kind of place is this?' in the context of active inference. This study provides insights into the technical aspects of the proposed method, including active perception and exploration by the robot, and how the method can enable mobile robots to learn spatial concepts through active exploration. Our experiment demonstrated the effectiveness of the SpCoAE in efficiently determining a destination for learning appropriate spatial concepts in home environments."

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Coarobo GK Founder Receives 13th Advanced Robotics Best Paper Award at RSJ 2025
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