Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering

Education

Research Interests

Dr. Davidson’s research interests include designing and building integrated robotic systems for labor-intensive applications requiring physical interaction in unstructured environments. His previous work includes robotic harvesting of fresh market apples and actuator design for robotic rehabilitation of neurologically impaired patients.

Biography 

Dr. Davidson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University. He received his B.S. from the United States Military Academy in 2004. After serving in the military for five years, Dr. Davidson worked as a project manager for the CH2M HILL Plateau Remediation Company at Hanford, WA from 2009 to 2012. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from Washington State University and was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2016 to 2018. A member of the Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute, his research group is currently working to help advance food security using robotics.

Selected Publications

Davidson, J.R. and Krebs, H.I., “An Electrorheological Fluid Actuator for Rehabilitation Robotics,” IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, 2018. In Press.

Alencastre-Miranda, M., Davidson, J.R., Johnson, R.M., Waguespack, H., and Krebs, H.I., “Robotics for Sugarcane Cultivation: Analysis of Billet Quality using Computer Vision,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol. 3(4): 3828-3835, 2018.

Silwal, A., Davidson, J.R., Karkee, M., Mo, C., Zhang, Q., and Lewis, K., “Design, Integration, and Field Evaluation of a Robotic Apple Harvester,” Journal of Field Robotics, Vol. 34(6): 1140-1159, 2017.