Dr. Duong, Duc Phu, and Thanh Long focused on research.
From July 26-28, two Human-Centered Engineering students, Nguyễn Đức Phú and Nguyễn Thành Long, received the Best Paper Award at the 7th International Conference on Control, Robotics, and Informatics (ICCRI) in Da Nang City. This conference serves as an academic forum where scholars, researchers, and experts from around the world share ideas, exchange information, and promote future collaboration. Supervised by Dr. Phung Manh Duong, their award-winning research focused on “Socially Aware Motion Planning for Service Robots Using LiDAR and RGB-D Camera.”
Dr. Phung Manh Duong and students Nguyen Duc Phu and Nguyen Thanh Long received the Best Paper Award at the 7th ICCRI.
The paper introduces a new algorithm that integrates human states and personal space to enable socially aware navigation. The system first extracts human positions and velocities from LiDAR sensors and RGB-D cameras. It then uses a Kalman filter to integrate the information, predicting human states. This process serves as the input for a dynamic window approach algorithm to generate the robot’s trajectory. The students concluded that robots could plan their movement in dynamic environments while respecting human physical and psychological boundaries.
Envisioning a future where humans and robots collaborate, the team emphasized the importance of robots operating safely and harmoniously with humans, both physically and mentally. Robots must not only avoid physical collisions but also understand human context and actions to make appropriate interaction decisions. To tackle this challenge, Duc Phu and Thanh Long combined modern sensors with deep learning techniques, optimal estimation theory, and real-time path planning algorithms. The team aims to build a highly reliable solution in complex, interference-prone environments.
Dr. Duong, Duc Phu, and Thanh Long focused on research.
Dr. Duong highlighted that the faculty of Human-Centered Engineering at Fulbright University Vietnam always guides students to focus their research on human-centered solutions, aiming to enhance the quality of life. “As their supervisor, I am impressed with the competence and independent working abilities of Duc Phu and Thanh Long. In just one semester, they completed a significant amount of work: identifying the problem, building the robot, developing recognition and estimation models, predicting behavior, integrating sensors, and implementing the solution on real-time embedded hardware. Throughout the research process, we also successfully collaborated with colleagues from the University of Technology Sydney and Vietnam National University, Hanoi, to address the challenges of this problem,” shared Dr. Duong.
Reflecting on their research journey, Duc Phu and Thanh Long said: “To implement the robotic system, we equipped ourselves with many new technical skills. The self-learning skills we developed at Fulbright helped us quickly absorb new knowledge. Additionally, the spirit of Human-Centered Engineering at Fulbright guides us toward research topics that positively impact human life. This mindset has been our greatest motivation to complete the research.”
Duc Phu and Thanh Long presented their research at the conference.
In the future, the team plans to expand the project in two directions: using advanced AI techniques like deep reinforcement learning and deep convolutional neural networks to recognize more human behaviors, and training robots to perform more human-friendly movements and interactions. Additionally, the team hopes to expand the system into multi-robot scenarios to implement complex algorithms and interactions, making human-machine collaboration more practical.
Phuong Anh, Nhu Y
