Ian D. Walker received the B.Sc. Degree (First Class Honours) in Mathematics from the University of Hull, England, in 1983 and the M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1985 and 1989, respectively. He then joined the faculty in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, where he was an Assistant Professor from 1989 to 1995, and a tenured Associate Professor from 1995 to 1997. In the fall of 1997, he moved to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University, where he became a full Professor in 2001.

Professor Walker is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Senior Member of the AIAA. He currently serves as Vice President for Financial Activities for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and from 2006-2008 served as Chair of the AIAA Technical Committee on Space Automation and Robotics. He has served on the Editorial Boards of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, the International Journal of Robotics and Automation, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, and the International Journal of Environmentally Conscious Design and Manufacturing. His research has been funded by DARPA, the National Science Foundation, NASA, NASA/EPSCoR, NSF/EPSCoR, the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Department of Energy, South Carolina Commission of Higher Education, Sandia National Laboratories, and Westinghouse Hanford Company.

Professor Walker's research centers on robotics, particularly novel manipulators and manipulation.  His group is conducting basic research in the construction, modeling, and application of biologically inspired "trunk, tentacle, and worm" robots. This work has recently been funded by DARPA under the DSO BIODYNOTICS program, by NASA, and by NASA/EPSCoR. For a summary of the DARPA work, click here. For a summary of the NASA work, click here. Another major focus is on the use of robotics to create novel (physical) spaces, particularly Animated Workspace Environments (AWE). This work is currently funded by the National Science Foundation. Professor Walker also conducts research in the area of fault tolerance and reliability of robots.

 

Selected Videos and Publications

VIDEOS

Trunk and Tentacle Robots

M. Hannan and I.D. Walker. Elephant's Trunk Robot Arm. Video Proceedings, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Seoul, Korea, May 2001.

B. Jones, W. McMahan, M. Pritts, V. Chitrakaran, D. Dienno, M. Grissom, M. Csencsits, C.D. Rahn, D. Dawson, and I.D. Walker. Grasping, Manipulation, and Exploration Tasks with the OCTARM Continuum Manipulator. Video Proceedings, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Orlando, Florida, USA, May 2006. Different format version here.

Several generations of the OCTARM Continuum Manipulator.

Animated Workspace Environments

Simulated robotic AWE wall moving between task configurations.

AWE wall hardware under development, full prototype coming summer 2008!
 

PUBLICATIONS

Trunk and Tentacle Robots

I.D. Walker. Some Issues in Creating "Invertebrate" Robots. In the Proceedings of the International Symposium on Adaptive Motion of Animals and Machines, Montreal, Canada, August 2000.

M.A. Hannan and I.D. Walker. Kinematics and the Implementation of an Elephant's Trunk Manipulator and Other Continuum Style Robots. Journal of Robotic Systems, Vol. 20, No. 2, February 2003, pp. 45-63.

I.A. Gravagne, I.D. Walker, and C.D. Rahn. Large Deflection Dynamics and Control for Planar Continuum Robots. IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Vol. 8, No. 2, June 2003, pp. 299-307.

I.D. Walker, D. Dawson, T. Flash, F. Grasso, R. Hanlon, B. Hochner, W.M. Kier, C. Pagano, C.D. Rahn, and Q. Zhang. Continuum Robot Arms Inspired by Cephalopods. In the proceedings of the 2005 SPIE Conference on Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology IV, Orlando, Florida, USA, March 2005, pp. 303-314.

W. McMahan, V. Chitrakaran, M. Csencsits, D. Dawson, I.D. Walker, B. Jones, M. Pritts, D. Dienno, M. Grissom, and C.D. Rahn. Field Trials and Testing of the OctArm Continuum Manipulator. In the proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Orlando, FL, May 2006, pp 2336-2341.

B. Jones and I.D. Walker. Kinematics for Multi-Section Continuum Robots. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Vol. 22, No. 1, February 2006, pp. 45-53.

V. Chitrakaran, A. Behal, D. Dawson, and I.D. Walker. Setpoint Regulation of Continuum Robots Using a Fixed Camera. Robotica, Vol. 25, No. 5, September 2007, pp. 581-586.

E. Tatlicioglu, I.D. Walker, and D. Dawson. New Dynamic Models for Planar Extensible Continuum Robot Manipulators. In the proceedings of the 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Systems (IROS), San Diego, CA, October 2007, pp 1485-1490.

S. Neppalli, M. Csencsits, B. Jones, and I.D. Walker. A Geometrical Approach to Inverse Kinematics for Continuum Manipulators. To appear, proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Systems (IROS), Nice, France, September 2008.

Animated Workspace Environments

K.E. Green, L.J. Gugerty, I.D. Walker, and J.C. Witte. AWE: Animated Work Environment: Ambient Intelligence in Working Life. In the Proceedings of the 2005 Conference on Intelligent Ambience and Well-Being (Ambience), Tampere, Finland, September 2005, pp. 1-7.

K.E. Green, I.D. Walker, L.J. Gugerty, and J.C. Witte. Three Robot-Rooms/ The AWE Project. In the Proceedings of the 2006 CHI Conference, Montreal, Canada, April 2006.

J. Johnson, M. Kwoka, H. Houayek, I.D. Walker, and K.E. Green. Design, Construction, and Testing of a Novel Robotic Workstation. In the Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems, Palmerston North, New Zealand, November 2007, pp. 155-160.

Robot Fault Detection and Fault Tolerance

C. Carreras and I.D. Walker. Interval Methods for Fault-Tree Analyses in Robotics. IEEE Transactions on Reliability, Vol. 50, No. 1, March 2001, pp. 3-11.

M. L. Leuschen, I.D. Walker, and J.R. Cavallaro. Fault Residual Generation via Nonlinear Analytical Redundancy. IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, Vol. 13, No. 3, May 2005, pp. 452-458.

M.L. McIntyre, W.E. Dixon, D.M. Dawson, and I. D. Walker. Fault Identification for Robot Manipulators. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Vol. 21, No. 5, October 2005, pp. 1028-1034.

F. Caccavale, P. Chiacchio, and I.D. Walker. A Time-Delayed Observer for Fault Detection and Isolation in Industrial Robots. Robotica, Vol. 24, September 2006, pp. 557-565.
 

Ian D. Walker/ianw@ces.clemson.edu