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Muhannad Mujahed, Hussein Jaddu, Dirk Fischer and Bärbel Mertsching won the Best Paper Award at the 11th IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR 2013) for their article "Tangential Closest Gap Based (TCG) Reactive Obstacle Avoidance Navigation for Cluttered Environments". SSRR is an annual conference which attracts cutting-edge papers in the theory and practice of robots for rapid and secure inspection of critical infrastructure, travelers, luggage, and paces; disaster response and recovery; humanitarian demining, disaster mitigation and recovery; detection of chemical, biological and radiological risks and operations in these dangerous sites; etc. The presentation was given by Muhannad Mujahed who is a doctoral student in GET Lab. The work was done in collaboration with Prof. Jaddu of Al-Quds University, Jerusalem.

The prize-winning paper addresses a new obstacle avoidance technique for mobile robots moving in dense and complex environments. The paper is chosen following consultation amongst the conference committee. They found the article especially pertinent to the conference topics and said: "our motivation for choosing this paper is that navigation in cluttered environments is a very important task for any robotic system working in disaster situations. It is a very important topic for this community. Also, we do believe that the authors did a very good job in combining previous works. Moreover, they have experimentally validated the new approach and compared it with the previous techniques. It is a very good example for theoretical and experimental work. It is also a very well written paper."