William Provancher - Assistant Professor

Dr. Provancher Phone: (801) 581-4119
Fax: (801) 585-9826
e-mail: wil@mech.utah.edu
Office: 2136 MEB (50 S Central Campus Dr.)
Lab: 2410 MEB (Ph: 585-7556)

Education

Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 2003

M.S. Materials Science & Engr., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 1995

B.S. Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 1993

Haptics Lab

Dr. Provancher heads the Haptics and Embedded Mechatronics Laboratory

2410 Merrill Engineering Building
(801) 585-7556

Research Interests

Haptics, Tactile Sensing and Feedback

Climbing Robots focusing on novel climbing strategies, tactile sensing, and integrated multi-functional limb design.

Meso-scale manufacturing and embedded mechatronics (Smart Materials) using manufacturing techniques such as SDM (Shape Deposition Manufacturing).

Teaching

ME EN 4000 - Engineering Design I
ME EN 6960 - Advanced Mechatronics

Representative Publications

Provancher, W. R., Kuchenbecker, K. J., Niemeyer, G., and Cutkosky, M. R., . " Contact Location Display for Haptic Perception of Curvature and Object Motion ," International Journal of Robotics Research , 24(9):691-702, September 2005.

Asbeck, A. T., Kim, S., Cutkosky, M. R., Provancher, W. R , Lanzetta, M., “ Scaling Hard Vertical Surfaces with Compliant Microspine Arrays ,” International Journal of Robotics Research, 25(12):1165-1179, December 2006.

Griffin, W.B., Provancher, W. R., and Cutkosky, M. R., Feedback Strategies for Telemanipulation with Shared Control of Object Handling Forces , Presence , December, 2005.

Clark, J. E., Provancher, W. R., Mitiguy, P. Theory, Simulation, And Hardware: Lab Design For An Integrated System Dynamics Education , In Proc. of ASME IMECE, Orlando, FL, Nov. 5-11, 2005.

Provancher, W. R. and Cutkosky, M. R., Sensing Local Geometry for Dexterous Manipulation . In Proc. of the Intl. Symposium on Experimental Robotics, Sant’Angelo d’Ischia, Italy, 2002, pp. 507-516.

Autumn, K., Buehler, M., Cutkosky, M., Fearing, R., Full, R., Goldman, D., Groff, R., Provancher, W., Rizzi, A., Saranli, U., Saunders, A., Koditschek, D. “Robotics In Scansorial Environments,” in SPIE proceedings on Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology VII, 2005.