Drexel Engineering will host the first Dean’s Distinguished Lecture Series of the 2013-2014 academic year on October 31 from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. in Mitchell Auditorium with
Dr. Paul Oh, professor and associate department head of the
Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics Department whose research focuses on how robotics is currently going through a rapid "growth spurt” as programs like the National Robotics Initiative (NRI) and the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) in the US and other programs in Europe and Asia have "tipped" the field into an era of disruptive and transformative products and services.
At the lecture titled, “Robotics: Passing the Tipping Point,” Oh will explain how today's unprecedented convergence of technologies makes the near-term outlook very promising. Driverless vehicles and robotic factory co-workers, eldercare co-helpers that were "dreams" yesterday, are commercially available today. The lecture will include a personal reflection of Oh’s experiences with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), humanoids and the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Such reflection serves to articulate this "tipping point" phenomena and how they factor into transformative research.
Oh received a bachelor's degree from McGill University, a master’s degree from Seoul National University and his doctoral degree from Columbia University; all in mechanical engineering. Oh has received several honors including faculty fellowships at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, Naval Research Lab, the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, the SAE Ralph Teetor Award for Engineering Education Excellence and being named a Boeing Welliver Fellow. He has served at NSF as the program director managing the robotics research portfolio and has authored over 70 referred archival papers, while editing two books in the areas of robotics and unmanned systems. Oh served as editor for several leading robotics publications and has was director for the NATO Advanced Studies Institute (ASI) in 2010 on Unmanned Systems, which gathered researchers from over 20 countries to capture the state of the art and formulate research roadmaps. He is currently the lead of Team DRC-Hubo for the 2012-2014 DARPA Robotics Challenge. He also serves as the director of the Drexel Autonomous Systems Lab and is the Founding Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Aerial Robotics and UAVs.
The Dean’s Lecture Series is free and open to the University.
To view the presentation, click here.