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 served as Vice President for Financial Activities for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society from 2006-2009, 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 been funded by DARPA under the DSO BIODYNOTICS program, by NASA, by the National Science Foundation, and by NASA/EPSCoR. For a summary of the DARPA work, click here. For a summary of the NASA work, click here. For continuum worm-like robots, click here. The work is currently funded by NASA, concentrating on long thin continuum robots, and by the National Science Foundation, concentrating on control and manipulation strategies for continuum robots.

Another major focus of Professor Walker's research is on the use of robotics to create novel (physical) spaces, for example Animated Workspace Environments (AWE) and an Assistive Robotic Table (ART). This work is funded by the National Science Foundation. For more information on this and related research in Architectural Robotics, see here. Another area in which Professor Walker is actively working is interactive perception for robot manipulation of textiles. This work is funded by the National Science Foundation. For more information on this research, click here and here.

Tiger vs. Gamecock click here

New graduate student presentation click here
 

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