Patrick Lancaster
Papers
11
Total Citations
200
H-Index
8
About
Patrick Lancaster is a roboticist whose work spans manipulation, sensing, and accessible hardware. He is best known for developing MuSHR, a low-cost, open-source robotic racecar platform that has become a staple in robotics education and research, with 45 citations. His major contributions center on pre-touch sensing—using optical proximity sensors to give robots a "sixth sense" just before grasping. This work, including his 2017 paper on sequential manipulation (39 citations) and his 2015 paper on transmissive pre-touch (17 citations), has advanced how robots perceive and handle objects in unstructured environments. Lancaster also explores unconventional sensing modalities, such as millimeter-wave radar for synthetic aperture imaging (30 citations), and has proposed novel benchmarks like the Rubik's Cube for manipulation (20 citations). His recent work on electrostatic brakes for underactuated robots and visuo-motor world models (MoDem-V2) pushes toward more dexterous, real-world manipulation. With over 200 total citations, Lancaster’s research is shaping the future of robot perception and manipulation, making him a key figure in the field.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1MuSHR: A Low-Cost, Open-Source Robotic Racecar for Education and Research45 citations · 2019
- 2Pre-touch sensing for sequential manipulation39 citations · 2017
- 32D and 3D millimeter-wave synthetic aperture radar imaging on a PR2 platform30 citations · 2016
- 4Benchmarking Robot Manipulation With the Rubik's Cube20 citations · 2020
- 5Transmissive optical pretouch sensing for robotic grasping17 citations · 2015
- 6Visionless Tele-Exploration of 3D Moving Objects15 citations · 2018
- 7Improved object pose estimation via deep pre-touch sensing13 citations · 2017
- 8
- 9MoDem-V2: Visuo-Motor World Models for Real-World Robot Manipulation5 citations · 2024
- 10