Ian McCammon

University of Utah, National Institute of Standards and Technology

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About

Ian McCammon’s research career is defined by pioneering work in tactile sensing and the control of dexterous robotic manipulation. A central figure in the development of the Utah/MIT Hand, his foundational 1990 paper on its tactile sensing and control (15 citations) established critical principles for integrating touch feedback into multi-fingered grippers. McCammon further advanced the field by addressing the complex engineering challenges of building compact, high-resolution force-sensing arrays, as detailed in his 2005 work on tactile sensing system design (14 citations). His contributions extend beyond hardware; he was an early visionary in the domain of distributed microsystems, exploring the communication and control architectures necessary for networks of microsensors and microactuators (11 citations). This work tackled fundamental issues of reliability and bandwidth that remain central to modern robotics and IoT. Notably, his early 1985 design of a conformal tactile sensing array—a pneumatically controlled matrix of displacement pins—demonstrated a novel approach to achieving high conformability, a key requirement for robust object manipulation. With a career spanning foundational hardware design to system-level control theory, McCammon’s research has provided essential building blocks for robots that can sense and interact with the world through touch.