Ben's Head Photo

I’m a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.  I like to run, downhill ski, and bike.  I’ve lived in San Francisco, Cocoa Beach, Houston, but greatly prefer Madison.

I’m IN, ORC’d, Git’n, and on ResearchGate; here’s my cv and website.

Some recent work

  • Ben Conrad’s PhD Defense This past Monday (11/21) I completed my PhD in Mechanical Engineering, bringing to a close my years as a student and my time at UW-Madison.  While I expect to break out parts of my research and dissertation in greater detail at my website, for now I want to post my dissertation and a recording of ...
  • Midwest Robotics Workshop This past May was the second annual Midwest Robotics Workshop at the Toyota Technical Institute in Chicago, where I showed some results from my PhD prelim. The workshop was surprisingly well-attended and was a great sampling of the research happening in the Midwest.    
  • ICRA 2015 – Closed Loop Task Space Control of an Interleaved Continuum-Rigid Manipulator IEEE held the 2015 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Seattle, WA this past May where Ben presented work on Closed Loop Task Space Control of an Interleaved Continuum-Rigid Manipulator. IEEE ICRA 2015 Highlight Talk from Bucky Badger on Vimeo. This work builds upon that presented at IROS 2014 by closing the manipulator control ...
  • IROS 2014 – Interleaved Continuum-Rigid Manipulation Ben presented initial work on a clinical-scale interleaved continuum-rigid manipulator at the IEEE conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2014) in Chicago this past September. Highlight Presentation 2014 IEEE IROS presentation from Bucky Badger on Vimeo. Interleaved Continuum-Rigid Manipulation In this paper we continued to develop the concept of Interleaved Continuum-Rigid Manipulation — first described at ICRA ...
  • Progress in Interleaved Manipulation Following on our work in the 2013 International Conference on Robotics and Automation, we have explored a number of new facets of this concept including evaluation of a new controller, the effects of rigid actuator saturation, the manipulation range overlap of the rigid and flexible joints, and increase in dexterity from the addition of the ...
  • ICRA 2013 Recap We traveled to Karlsruhe, Germany to present at the 2013 International Conference on Robotics and Automation this past May.  In this presentation we introduced the idea of Interleaved Continuum-Rigid Manipulation and shared our initial experimental and simulation results. Interleaved Continuum-Rigid Manipulation Manually-controlled catheters are used widely due to their unique ability to navigate the anatomy and ...