Dr. Roberts received B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and in Mathematics from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 1987 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1988 and 1992, respectively, from Purdue University. From 1992-1994, he was a National Research Council Fellow at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. Since 1994, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Florida A&M University - Florida State University College of Engineering where he is currently a Professor.
Dr. Roberts' research and teaching interests center on the analysis, simulation, and control of human-robot systems, especially for the design of fault-tolerant systems and the control of teleoperation systems. He has authored or co-authored over 150 refereed publications in journals, books, and conferences. His research has been supported by NSF, US Air Force, Army Research Laboratory, NASA, National Imagery and Mapping Agency, Missile Defense Agency, and the Air Force Research Laboratory.
He is a current or past Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, The International Journal of Intelligent Automation and Soft Computing, International Journal of Robotics and Automation, and International Journal of Automation and Computing. He has also served on the IEEE Robotics and Automation Conference Editorial Board and the IEEE/RSJ Intelligent Robots and Systems Conference Editorial Board.
Dr. Roberts has also been active in conference organization, serving as the Program Chair for the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics in San Antonio, Texas; the General Chair for the 2007 IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation in Jacksonville, Florida; the Co-Chair of the Robotics Program of the 2000 World Automation Congress in Maui, Hawaii; the General Chair of the 2000 IEEE Southeastern Symposium on System Theory in Tallahassee, Florida; and the General Chair of the 2001 Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics in Tallahassee, Florida. He has served as a member of several panel discussions including "The Next Wave of Technology" at the 2010 Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics in Jacksonville, Florida, and "Brain Machine Interfaces – A New Research Avenue for Cybernetics and Systems Science" at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, in San Antonio, Texas.
Ben-Gharbia, K. M., Maciejewski, A. A., & Roberts, R. G. (2014). "A Kinematic Analysis and Evaluation of Planar Robots Designed from Optimally Fault-Tolerant Jacobians". IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 30(2), 516-524.
Moon, Y., Crane, C. D., & Roberts, R. G. (2013). "Reverse kinetostatic analysis and stiffness synthesis of a spatial tensegrity-based compliant mechanism". Mechanism and Machine Theory, 70, 320–337.
Coyle, E. J., Roberts, R. G., Collins, E. G., & Barbu, A. (2013). "Synthetic data generation for classification via uni-modal cluster interpolation". Autonomous Robots, 1-19. DOI: 10.1007/s10514-013-9373-9.
Ben-Gharbia, K. M., Maciejewski, A. A., & Roberts, R. G. (2013). "Kinematic Design of Redundant Robotic Manipulators for Spatial Positioning that are Optimally Fault Tolerant". IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 29(5), 1300-1307.