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Ralph Hollis
Research Professor

Associated center: CFR

Email address: rhollis@cs.cmu.edu
Office: EDSH 121
Phone: (412) 268-8264

Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

For more information, see my personal homepage.

Jump to: Research interests | Keywords | Labs & groups | Projects | Publications

Research interests

My current research effort focuses on three main areas, all involving the creation of innovative new hardware, software, and systems. The first area concerns distributed agent-based cooperative high-precision manipulation. The principal application is agile assembly of small high-precision electromechanical products such as computer storage devices, medical devices, communication devices, and other high-density mechatronic equipment. The goal is to revolutionize the assembly of these kinds of products by drastically reducing the time it takes to design, program, and deploy automated assembly systems, while increasing their precision by several orders of magnitude and reducing their physical size. The second area concerns human-computer interaction, especially through haptic interaction with computed or remote environments. Here a goal is to enable truly transparent and high-fidelity interaction with eventual application to medicine, computer-augmented design, and telemanipulation, including scaled manipulation of microscopic and nanoscopic objects. The third area concerns intelligent mobile robots which are dynamically stable, including both rolling and walking machines. If such robots are to operate successfully in peopled environments, they must be agile and responsive to physical interaction with humans and their surroundings.

In my experience, it is often very effective to synthesize novel robotic technology directly from physical principles, applying good engineering judgment rather than trying to build systems around collections of existing components. For this approach, a broad background including knowledge of physics, electrical and mechanical engineering, computer programming, and design is helpful. It is also extremely valuable to apply newly developed robot technology to real-world problems. Only in this way can one gain insight into the requirements for the technology.

This section last updated - January 1999.

Research interest keywords

acoustics, actuators, architectures, assembly, control, design, factory and warehouse automation, haptics, human-computer interaction, legged locomotion, manipulation, manufacturing, mechanisms, mechatronics, microrobotics, multi-agent systems, sensors, and teleoperation

Current Labs & Groups

Microdynamic Systems Laboratory - Exploring the limits of robotics in terms of speed, precision, dexterity and miniaturization.
 

Current Projects [Past projects]

Architecture for Agile Assembly - Reduction of time to market in agile manufacturing
Dynamically-Stable Mobile Robots in Human Environments - We are developing novel dynamically-stable rolling machine and walking machine research platforms to study interactions with people and operating in normal home and workplace environments.
Free-Roaming Planar Motors - We are developing autonomous planar motors for precision positioning.
Magnetic Levitation Haptic Consortium - Low-cost, high-fidelity haptic magnetic levitation haptic interface systems for use by a consortium of haptics researchers in the United States
Psychophysics of Haptic Interaction - Quantitative comparisons of human subjects performing peg-in-hole experiments with real, virtual, and real-remote haptic environments
Robots in Scansorial Environments - We are developing a bioinspired climbing robot with the unique ability to walk on land and climb on vertical surfaces.
Teleoperation with a 12-DOF Coarse-Fine Manipulator - High-fidelity manipulation of remote environments using a 6-DOF robot equipped with a 6-DOF magnetic levitation fine-motion wrist.
 

Recent publications [View all 46 publications]

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