Undergraduate students at IROS

The IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) is among the top two conferences for robotics (the other being ICRA). This year’s acceptance rate was 45%. My group including PhD students and undergraduate students submitted 6 papers in total and 4 papers got accepted. We were rejoiced to see a paper submitted by an undergraduate group with some support from PhD students were among the accepted papers. Another undergraduate student was a co-author of an accepted paper. This is a good encouragement to our efforts to give a World class experience to undergraduate students at King’s. Though the students who dared to submit papers to such a highly competitive international conference had to put a lot of extra effort than the norm, their achievement will put them ahead of their peers in the job markets. In the words of the students themselves, “the experience was awesome. We got to do advanced experiments, collect data, and analyze them in a professional manner we had never done before. Now we feel that we can face any design and experimental challenge and we don’t feel scared to embark upon new technical projects. It was a great experience!”.

I am pretty sure this attitude is what employers are looking for in a fresh graduate. I am sure more and more undergraduate students will volunteer to submit papers to competitive international conferences and journals and stay ahead of the competition in these tough times.