Rate My Professor Rodney Roberts

Rodney Roberts, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Florida A&M University-Florida State University College of Engineering. He received B.S. degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 1987, an M.S. in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1988, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1992. After completing his doctorate, Roberts served as a National Research Council Fellow at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, from 1992 to 1994. He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering in 1994 as an Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1999, and to Professor in 2005. He also participated as a Summer Faculty Fellow at NASA Kennedy Space Center in 1996 and 1997, and at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 2005.

Roberts' research interests center on the analysis, simulation, and control of human-robot systems, especially the design of fault-tolerant behaviors in human-supervised autonomous robotic systems and control of teleoperation systems; additional interests include robotics, teleoperation, and image processing. He has over 150 refereed publications, including "A Kinematic Analysis and Evaluation of Planar Robots Designed from Optimally Fault-Tolerant Jacobians" (Ben-Gharbia, K. M., Maciejewski, A. A., & Roberts, R. G., IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2014), "Kinematic Design of Redundant Robotic Manipulators for Spatial Positioning that are Optimally Fault Tolerant" (Ben-Gharbia, K. M., Maciejewski, A. A., & Roberts, R. G., IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2013), "Reverse kinetostatic analysis and stiffness synthesis of a spatial tensegrity-based compliant mechanism" (Moon, Y., Crane, C. D., & Roberts, R. G., Mechanism and Machine Theory, 2013), and "Synthetic data generation for classification via uni-modal cluster interpolation" (Coyle, E. J., Roberts, R. G., Collins, E. G., & Barbu, A., Autonomous Robots, 2013). In 2018, he received the IEEE Outstanding Contribution Award recognizing his contributions and leadership in robotics and automation. A Senior Member of IEEE, Roberts has served as Associate Editor for several journals, including IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics and IEEE Transactions on Robotics. He has organized major conferences, such as serving as Program Chair for the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics and General Chair for the 2007 IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation. His work has been supported by funding from NSF, NASA, the U.S. Air Force, Army Research Laboratory, National Imagery and Mapping Agency, Missile Defense Agency, and Air Force Research Laboratory.