August 26, 2016

This summer, we had two "Round 2" SURI students: Michael Raitor and Annalisa Taylor. Michael was mentored by Heather and Julie, and Annalisa was mentored by Melisa.

June 29, 2016

Tania Morimoto, Yuhang Che, and Allison Okamura attended the 2016 IEEE BioRob Conference in Singapore. Tania won the National Science Foundation-sponsored Best Student Paper Award for her paper "Surgeon Design Interface for Patient-Specific Concentric Tube Robots", which describes work done in collaboration with Joey Greer and surgeon collaborator Michael Hsieh. Also, Allison gave a keynote talk on "Modeling, Planning, and Control for Robot-Assisted Medical Interventions".

(Left) Tania receiving the Best Student Paper award from NSF program manager Alexander Leonessa. (Right) Yuhang with his poster, along with Tania, Allison, and Laura Blumenschein, a PhD student who will be joining the CHARM Lab this summer. Laura was at BioRob representing Marcia' O'Malley's laboratory, where she completed her MS thesis.

June 29, 2016

Check out Next Generation Robotics, a Computing Community Consortium (CCC) white paper. Following the Robotics Roadmaps published in 2009 and 2013, this report sets forth a perspective of progress in robotics over the past five years, and provides a set of recommendations for the future. The white paper is co-authored by Henrik I Christensen, Allison Okamura, Maja Mataric, Vijay Kumar, Greg Hager, and Howie Choset, and it includes input from dozens of robotics researchers and industry practitioners who participated in workshops held in early 2016..

May 16-21, 2016

Elliot Hawkes, Kirsten Kaplan, Andrew Stanley, Jake Suchoski, Heather Culbertson, and Allison Okamura attended the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Stockholm, Sweden.

CHARM Lab members, alumni, and friends enjoying themselves at ICRA 2016

May 16, 2016

Postdoc Heather Culbertson's work was featured in a New Yorker article about the sense of touch.

April 22, 2016

Our previous work integrating the Hapkit with Matlab is now featured in a Mathworks educational video.

April 8-11, 2016

Heather Culbertson, Melisa Orta, and Julie Walker attached the 2016 IEEE Haptics Symposium in Philadelphia. All three gave oral presentations and demonstrations of their research.

March 31, 2016

The Hapkit and online haptics course were featured on ASME News.

March 26-June 18, 2016

Allison (and her family) will be in Kyoto, Japan for Spring Quarter, teaching with Stanford's Bing Overseas Studies Program. Pictures and news of activities of the program are posted on the Stanford Program in Kyoto Facebook Page. Nora's blog about our adventures is here.

March 18, 2016

Andrew Stanley successfully defended his Ph.D. defense today -- congratulations! Below, Andrew is showing his family his 100-cell Haptic Jamming device.

March 18, 2016

Darrel Deo was awarded the Stanford Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Doctoral Fellowship. Congratulations, Darrel!

March 18, 2016

Sam Schorr was awarded the Link Foundation Fellowship in Modeling, Simulation, and Training for the 2016-17 academic year. Congratulations, Sam!

March 13, 2016

Allison was featured on the National Geographic Channel show Brain Games (Season 7, Episode 5: "Super Senses"). Allison runs a couple of mini-experiments demonstrating haptic illusions on the show. There is a publicly available clip of one of the experiments here.

December 12, 2015

Some CHARMers ran the Summit Rock Half Marathon in the beautiful redwood groves of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Sean won overall, Kirsten was the first-place woman, and Kirk, Andrew, and Joey were 3rd, 4th, and 5th, respectively, in their age group. Amazing! Allison managed to finish -- enough said.

November 10, 2015

Sean Sketch was honored today for receiving a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship. Congratulations, Sean!

November 9, 2015

Kirk Nichols successfully defended his Ph.D. defense today -- congratulations! (Kirk is shown below giving his talk -- wearing his formal kilt.)

November 3, 2015

Troy Adebar successfully defended his Ph.D. defense today -- congratulations! (Troy is shown below giving his talk.)

October 23, 2015

The Bay Area Robotics Symposium (formerly known as the Stanford-Berkeley Robotics Symposium) will be held in Berkeley on Oct. 23, 2015! Allison will give a talk, and Kamran and Sean will give posters.

October 8, 2015

Jorge Cham's PhD Movie 2 screens on campus! Looks for characters named "Allison" and "Mariko Okamura". NOT a coincidence!

September 28 - October 2, 2015

Allison and Kirk attended IROS 2015 in Hamburg, Germany. No pictures, because Allison's cell phone died. :(

September 1, 2015

It's official, Allison is now a FULL Professor. Apparently that means she can be put on more committees.