NSH 3216
412-445-8113
ram@ri.cmu.edu
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ram

Home:
6616 Dalzell Place
Pittsburgh, PA 15217
412-521-0846

Gallery: (click image for summary page)

Specialties:

• Analog and power electronics: High-sensitivity/low-noise signal conditioning (microvolt/picoamp), interfacing and packaging for reliable operation, thermal analysis, signal integrity and grounding. Sensor technology, especially non-contact position tracking. Optical, capacitive and magnetic sensor design.
• Practical mechanical design and fabrication of prototypes and research apparatus. Mechanical CAD, design for production by machining and using additive processes.
• Mechatronics and control: design of mechanisms with desirable dynamics, system identification and controller design. Kinematics and navigation: 3D spatial/geometric problems, navigation sensors, map-based navigation.
• Time and frequency domain signal processing to extract meaning from noisy signals: IIR, FIR, Fourier, Kalman and particle filters, tracking and statistical signal processing.

Proficiencies:
Writing efficient maintainable code in Labview, Matlab, Java, C++, Python, and many other languages, embedded real-time systems, Spice, PC board CAD, FPGA, SolidWorks, prototyping and troubleshooting, manual machining and technical writing.

Education:
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: B.S. in Applied Mathematics (Computer Science), 1987. I have since taken courses in sensor technology, control systems, analog IC design and biomedical instrumentation.

Experience:
I have 40 years experience implementing research ideas as high-quality software. I have also created many entire mechatronic systems, from assignment of functions to hardware or software, through design, fabrication, control software development, tuning and performance characterization.

I have been on the technical staff at Carnegie Mellon University for my entire career (Senior Research Engineer since 2010). My responsibilities have included management of small project teams, communicating with consortium members, grant writing, and representing CMU projects to sponsors.

2022-present:

Several projects in the Create and Auton labs: Breathecam, Mindfulnest, and medical trauma experiments. Mechanical design CAD and 3D printing, electronic design, data acquisition, biomedical device design. Mechanical design and fabrication has been a recent emphasis.

2020-2021:

Working in the Surgical Mechatronics Lab on the In-Loop Electromagnetic Tracker (ILEMT) project. I did preliminary work, wrote a successful R01 proposal, and implemented the hardware and preliminary software for this precision high-speed 6DOF measurement system.

2017-present:

On my own time, developed a high vacuum plasma processing system and vacuum casting furnace.

2014-2019:

Working in the Auton lab on spatial data processing and data fusion for radioactive source detection and localization. This included application of previous MCL work to an indoor backpack inertial dead reckoning system.

2006-2013:

Working in the Surgical Mechatronics Lab, primarily on the Micron project, developing a stabilized microsurgical instrument. I developed the controller software and electronics for three versions of Micron and the ASAP micro-scale position tracker. I have also was highly involved in the manipulator mechanical design.

2001-2006:

Designed and built control electronics and software for automation of the NAVLAB 11 autonomous jeep. This is a safety critical system which controls the steering, throttle and brake. Created three microcontroller subsystems with associated analog and digital interface electronics and power drivers. Participated in the electro-mechanical aspects of actuator design such as motor selection. Designed and constructed the safety subsystem, which returns the vehicle to manual operation in event of a control malfunction. Created software to determine the position and orientation of a vehicle using inputs from inertial sensors, odometry and GPS.

2003-2006:

Created Tracking software for the Bus Side Collision Warning System project that uses laser scanner data to estimate the motion of vehicles and pedestrians. This tracker is highly successful, and was used in both Red Team Grand Challenge robots.

2003:

Developed hardware and software for multi-channel capacitive proximity sensor with 10 atto-Farad sensitivity intended for use in as a low-cost people detector for collision warning systems on cars and buses.

2001-2002:

Implemented a map-based navigation module using a Markov Chain Monte-Carlo approach (particle filter) which can determine the position of a vehicle using road or elevation map data. Created tracker for a prototype automotive radar using a Kalman filter and statistical signal detection.

1999-2001:

Robotics Institute, Tactical Mobile Robotics project: Contributed to the successful development and demonstration of a complete mobile robot system by developing mobile robot software and hardware. My main contributions were navigation, motion planning and software integration.

1994-1998:

Computer Science Department, Gwydion Project: A developer of the Sheets Hypercode environment for Java. Developed the concept of Hypercode and designed frameworks to manipulate it. Worked on proposals and gave presentations to sponsors. Co-designed and was an implementor for d2c, a Dylan-to-C compiler written in Dylan.

1983-1993:

CMU Common Lisp project, Senior Research Programmer. Design and implementation of the Python compiler for CMU Common Lisp. Primary developer of a Lisp integrated development environment. Contributed to the design and standardization of ANSI Common Lisp, which was a collaboration between many diverse academic and industrial partners.

Prior to 1983:

Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Department. Part time programmer for the Spice project.

Representative publications:

• Power voltage-current converter using quasi-complementary MOSFET current mirrors
  Robert MacLachlan and Cameron Riviere
  Electronics Letters, Vol. 47, No. 21, April, 2013, pp. 1173 - 1175

• Micron: an actively stabilized handheld tool for microsurgery
  Robert A. MacLachlan, Brian C. Becker, Jaime Cuevas Tabares, Gregg W. Podnar, Louis A. Lobes, Jr. and Cameron N. Riviere
  IEEE Transactions on Robotics, February, 2012, 28(1): 195-212.

• High-Speed Microscale Optical Tracking Using Digital Frequency-Domain Multiplexing
  Robert MacLachlan and Cameron Riviere
  IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, Vol. 58, No. 6, June, 2009, pp. 1991 - 2001.

• Tracking of Moving Objects from a Moving Vehicle Using a Scanning Laser Rangefinder
  Robert MacLachlan and Christoph Mertz
  Intelligent Transportation Systems 2006, September, 2006, pp. 301-306.

• Safe Robot Driving C. Thorpe, R. Aufrere, J.D. Carlson, D. Duggins, T.W. Fong, J. Gowdy, J. Kozar, R. MacLachlan, C. McCabe, C. Mertz, A. Suppe, C. Wang, and T. Yata
  Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Automation (ICMA 2002)
  September, 2002.

• Experiments with Driving Modes for Urban Robots
  M. Hebert, R. MacLachlan, and P. Chang
  Proceedings of SPIE, 1999.

• The Python Compiler for CMU Common Lisp
  Robert A. MacLachlan,
  1992 ACM Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Lisp Pointers, January, 1992, (1):235-246