Oussama Khatib ( ar, أسامة الخطيب) is a

roboticist Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrat ...

and a professor of computer science at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, and a

Fellow of the IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

. He is credited with seminal work in areas ranging from robot

motion planning Motion planning, also path planning (also known as the navigation problem or the piano mover's problem) is a computational problem to find a sequence of valid configurations that moves the object from the source to destination. The term is used ...

and

control Control may refer to: Basic meanings Economics and business * Control (management), an element of management * Control, an element of management accounting * Comptroller (or controller), a senior financial officer in an organization * Controllin ...

, human-friendly robot design, to haptic interaction and human motion synthesis. His work's emphasis has been to develop theories, algorithms, and technologies, that control robot systems by using models of their physical dynamics. These dynamic models are used to derive optimal controllers for complex robots that interact with the environment in real-time.

Life

Khatib received a Ph.D. in

Electrical Engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from Sup’Aero, Toulouse, France, in 1980. He then joined the

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

Department at

, and has been a member of the faculty there ever since. He is presently the director of the Stanford Robotics Laboratory, and a member of the

Stanford University Bio-X Initiative Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. S ...

Work

Academic work

Khatib's first seminal contribution was the artificial potential field method, which avoids the complex robot

problem by projecting controlling robots with potential fields in task space. First introduced in 1978, the method was motivated by the pressing need to enable reactive robot operation in unstructured environments, and it has since been adopted and extended by a growing number of researchers in a wide range of areas and applications in robotics, graphics, vision, and animation. Khatib, with Sean Quinlan, later proposed the elastic band model, which provided a robot planner with the ability to adjust and modify its planned motions during execution while efficiently detecting potential collisions using a sphere hierarchy. Khatib's next contribution was the operational space formulation in 1980, which avoids controlling robots joint-by-joint and instead formulates the robot dynamics, performance analysis, and control in the very space where the task is specified. When used with an accurate inertial dynamic model, this method solves the problem of joint motion coordination in a kinetic energy optimal manner. Since the 1980s, Khatib and his lab have made fundamental advances in macro-mini robots (serial structures), cooperative robots (parallel structures), dexterous dynamic coordination, virtual linkages to model internal forces in cooperative manipulation, posture and whole body control, dynamic task decoupling, optimal control, human-robot compliant interaction, elastic strips for real-time path planning, human motion synthesis, and human-friendly robot design. Khatib's contributions also span the field of haptic interaction and dynamic simulation. His work with Diego Ruspini in haptic rendering established some of the basic foundations for haptic explorations of virtual environments—the virtual proxy for haptics rendering, haptic shading, texture, and collision detection. This founding work was pursued with Francois Conti to address the display of deformable objects, the expansion of workspace for spanning large volumes with small haptic devices, and the efficient and safe hybrid actuation of haptic devices, with numerous applications including ultrasound examination in pregnancy The Khatib group's present day interests include modeling human motor control, muscle actuated control, humanoid robotics, haptics in neuroimaging, and multi-contact control. ;Memberships *President of the International Foundation for Robotics Research (IFRR) *Fellow of the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

(IEEE)

Robots

; Stanford Robotics Platforms (Romeo and Juliet) In the mid-1990s, Khatib's lab focused their efforts towards developing robot manipulation in a human environment. The Stanford Robotics Platforms, developed in the process, were the first fully integrated holonomic mobile manipulation platforms and were later known as Romeo and Juliet. This effort gave birth to a commercial holonomic mobile robot, the Nomad XR4000,Nomad XR4000 Robot
/ref> by Nomadic Technologies. The models and algorithms resulting from this project established the basis for his later exploration of humanoid robotics like the Honda ASIMO. ;Haptic fMRI Interface (HFI) Developed in 2013 b
Samir Menon
Gerald Brantner, and Chris Aholt under Khatib's supervision
HFI
is a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) compatible haptic interface with three degrees-of-freedom.
/ref> The interface allows subjects to perform virtual haptic tasks inside the entire bore of an MRI machine, and is lightweight and transparent to enable high fidelity neuroscience experiments. Khatib's group has successfully demonstrated real-time closed-loop haptic control during a high resolution fMRI scan with low enough noise levels to enable single subject analyses without smoothing.

Prizes

* IEEE RAS Robotics and Automation Technical Field Award (TFA) 2017 * IEEE RAS George Saridis Leadership Award 2014. * IEEE RAS Distinguished Service Award 2013.IEEE RAS Distinguished Service Award 2013
/ref> * IEEE RAS Pioneer Award 2010.IEEE RAS Pioneer Award 2010
/ref> *

PROSE Award The PROSE Awards (Professional and Scholarly Excellence) are presented by the Association of American Publishers’ (AAP) Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division. Presented since 1976, the awards annually recognize distinguished prof ...

for Excellence in Physical Sciences & Mathematics 2008.PROSE Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences & Mathematics 2008
/ref> * Japan Robot Association (JARA) Award in Research and Development. In 2018 Khatib was elected to the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...

for contributions to the understanding, analysis, control, and design of robotic systems operating in complex, unstructured, and dynamic environments.

Selected publications

* * * * *. Alternative .