Aaron Dollar
Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science and Computer Science
Yale University
Email: aaron.dollar@yale.edu
Office Phone: +1-203-436-9122
URL: https://www.eng.yale.edu/grablab/
Aaron Dollar is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science and Computer Science at Yale University, where he has been on faculty since 2009. He earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering Sciences at Harvard, and conducted two years of Postdoctoral research at the MIT Media Lab. Professor Dollar directs the Yale GRAB Lab, with research primarily focused on human and robotic grasping and dexterous manipulation, mechanisms and machine design, and upper-limb prosthetics. He has received a number of best paper and other prestigious awards, including junior faculty awards from NASA, DARPA, AFOSR, and NSF. His service to the Robotics research community includes the YCB benchmarking initiatives, the Yale OpenHand Project, OpenRobotHardware.org, RoboticsCourseware.org, and founding the IEEE RAS TC on Robotic Mechanisms and Design. His work on robotic grasping and manipulation focuses primarily on the mechanics of the problem, including contacts, passive and active degrees of freedom, and other constraints, and how proper focus on those, combined with clever mechanical design can facilitate excellent performance with even minimal sensing and control.