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About

Bahram Ravani is a distinguished robotics and mechanical engineering researcher whose career has fundamentally advanced our understanding of robot kinematics, calibration, and computational geometry of motion. His work spans three deeply interconnected domains: robot calibration and precision, computational kinematics and dynamics of mechanical manipulators, and the geometric design of robot motions. Ravani's 1987 overview of robot calibration, his most cited work with over 500 citations, became a foundational reference in the field, systematically addressing modeling, measurement, identification, and correction challenges that define robot precision engineering. Alongside this, his investigations into the dynamic load carrying capacity of manipulators provided both theoretical formulations and practical computational procedures that shaped trajectory optimization research throughout the late 1980s. Perhaps most distinctively, Ravani pioneered the fusion of classical kinematics with computer-aided geometric design, developing elegant frameworks for constructing Bézier motions and extending curve design algorithms to the design of rigid body motions — contributions that proved influential in robotics animation, motion planning, and surface reconstruction. His introduction of line geometry as a practical engineering tool further broadened these applications. With a body of work accumulating over 1,000 citations, Ravani remains a significant intellectual force in computational kinematics and robot engineering.