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Robert D. Howe

Faculty
  • Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering
Robert D. Howe

Contact Information

Nickname: Rob
Office: Pierce Hall 323
Email: howe [ AT ] seas [ DOT ] harvard [ DOT ] edu
Office Phone: (617) 496-8359
Office Fax: (617) 495-9837
Lab Name: BioRobotics Lab
Lab Room: 60 Oxford St. Room 312
Lab Phone: (617) 496-9098

Websites

Education

  1. B.A., Physics, Reed College
  2. Ph.D., 1990, Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University

Research Interests

    • Computer Science
    • Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging
    • Human-Computer Interaction
    • Intelligent Systems and Computer Vision
    • Electrical Engineering
    • Robotics and Control
    • Marriage of Biological & Artificial Systems
    • Bio-Inspired Robotics and Computing
    • Biomechanics and Motor Control

Primary Teaching Area

Materials Science & Mechanical Engineering

Secondary Teaching Area

Bioengineering

Profile

Robert D. Howe is Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering in the school of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Professor Howe founded the BioRobotics Laboratory in 1990, which investigates the roles of sensing and mechanical design in motor control, both in humans and in robots. His research interests focus on robot and human manipulation and the sense of touch. Biomedical applications of this work include the development of robotic and image-guided approaches to minimally invasive surgical procedures. Dr. Howe earned a bachelors degree in physics from Reed College, then worked as a design engineer in the electronics industry in Silicon Valley. He received a doctoral degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University in 1990, and then joined the faculty at Harvard.

 

Positions & Employment

Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

  • Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering

Selected Publications

  1. P. Jordan, A.E. Kerdok, R.D. Howe, and S. Socrate, Identifying a Minimal Rheological Configuration: A Tool for Effective and Efficient Constitutive Modeling of Soft Tissues, Journal of Biomechanical Engineering, Vol. 133, No. 4 041006 April 2011.
  2. SG Yuen, DP Perrin, NV Vasilyev, PJ del Nido, RD Howe, Force Tracking With Feed-Forward Motion Estimation for Beating Heart Surgery, IEEE Transactions on Robotics Vol. 26, No.5, 888-896, 2010. Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/TRO.2010.2053734.
  3. Robert J. Schneider, Douglas P. Perrin, Nikolay V. Vasilyev, Gerald R. Marx, Pedro J. del Nido, and Robert D. Howe, Mitral Annulus Segmentation from 3D Ultrasound Using Graph Cuts, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, Vol. 20, No. 9, 1676-1687, 2010.
  4. Aaron M. Dollar and Robert D. Howe, The Highly Adaptive SDM Hand: Design and Performance Evaluation, The International Journal of Robotics Research, Vol. 29, No. 5, 585-597, 2010.
  5. Shelten G. Yuen, Nikolay V. Vasilyev, Pedro J. del Nido , Robert D. Howe, Robotic Tissue Tracking for Beating Heart Mitral Valve Surgery, Medical Image Analysis, 2010, In Press.
  6. Daniel Rudoy, Shelten G. Yuen, Robert D. Howe, Patrick J. Wolfe, Bayesian change-point analysis for atomic force microscopy and soft material indentation, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C (Applied Statistics) 59(4):573-593, 2010, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9876.2010.00715.
  7. Michael Yip, Shelten G. Yuen, and Robert D. Howe, A Robust Uniaxial Force Sensor for Minimally Invasive Surgery, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering vol. 57, no. 5, pp. 1008-1011, May 2010.
  8. Aaron M. Dollar, Leif Jentoft, Jason H. Gao, and Robert D. Howe, Contact Sensing and Grasping Performance of Compliant Hands, Autonomous Robots, special issue on Mobile Manipulation, 28(1) 2010.
  9. R.A. Beasley, R.D. Howe, Increasing Accuracy in Image-Guided Robotic Surgery Through Tip Tracking and Model-Based Flexion Correction, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 25(2):292-302, 2009. DOI 10.1109/TRO.2009.2014498.

Patents Awarded

  1. P. S. Wellman. J.S. Son, R.D. Howe, System generating a pressure profile across a pressure sensitive membrane,” U.S. Patent No. 5,983,727, November 16, 1999.
  2. R. D. Howe and G. Kychakoff, "Fiber-optic Inverse-square Displacement Sensor," U.S. Patent No. 4,865,443, September 12, 1989.