ACM SIGGRAPH Course on
Recent Advances in Haptic Rendering & Applications

Kenneth Salisbury is well known for his seminal contributions to the fields of robotics, haptics, and robotically assisted surgery, and for his successes in facilitating transfer of these technologies. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University in 1982. From 1982 to 1999 he served at MIT as Principal Research Scientist in Mechanical Engineering and as a member of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Among the projects with which he has been associated are the Stanford-JPL Robot Hand, the JPL Force Reflecting Hand Controller, the MIT-WAM arm, and the Black Falcon Surgical Robot. His work with haptic interface technology led to the founding of SensAble Technologies Inc., producers of the PHANTOM haptic interface and FreeForm software. In 1997 he became the Scientific Adviser to Intuitive Surgical in Mountain View, where his efforts focused on the development of dexterity-enhancing telerobotic systems for surgeons. In the Fall of 1999, he joined the faculty at Stanford in the departments of Computer Science and Surgery, where his research now focuses on human-centered robotics, collaborative computer-mediated haptics, and surgical simulation. He currently serves on the National Science Foundation's Advisory Council for Robotics and Human Augmentation, as Scientific Adviser to Intuitive Surgical, Inc., and as Technical Adviser to Robotic Ventures, Inc.