Paul Sharkey

About

Paul Sharkey is a robotics and control systems researcher whose work spans several decades of foundational contributions to robot manipulation, active vision, and real-time control architectures. His research is particularly notable for bridging theoretical control frameworks with practical hardware implementations, making him a valuable figure in applied robotics. Sharkey's early work in the late 1980s and early 1990s explored parallel processing architectures using transputers for real-time robot control, demonstrating how distributed computing could meet the demanding performance requirements of industrial manipulators. His later contributions to active vision systems — including the Yorick series and gaze control algorithms — advanced understanding of how robots can dynamically track and respond to visual stimuli, accumulating over 50 combined citations. His comprehensive tutorial on robot head kinematics (21 citations) remains a reference standard for stereo vision researchers. Among his most influential contributions is a 40-citation study on retrofitting and implementing computed torque control on a PUMA 560 manipulator, demonstrating that rigorous control strategies could be practically realized even on legacy hardware. His investigations into system delays in visually guided systems (35 citations) further highlighted the performance trade-offs critical to real-world robotic deployment. Sharkey's body of work reflects a career dedicated to making sophisticated robotic control both theoretically sound and experimentally accessible.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Hardware retrofit and computed torque control of a Puma 560 Robot updating an industrial manipulator

   40 citations · 2004
2. 2
   Delays versus performance of visuallyguided systems

   35 citations · 1996
3. 3
   Hardware development of the Yorick series of active vision systems

   22 citations · 1998
4. 4
   On the kinematics of robot heads

   21 citations · 1997
5. 5
   Transputer based real time robot control

   11 citations · 1990
6. 6
   Transputer control of a Puma 560 robot via the virtual bus

   11 citations · 1990
7. 7
   From saccades to smooth pursuit: real-time gaze control using motion feedback

   9 citations · 2002
8. 8
   Joint servoing for robust manipulator force control

   9 citations · 2002
9. 9
   Extended Kalman filtering for robotic proximity sensing

   7 citations · 2002
10. 10
    Chaos in high performance digital robot controllers

    2 citations · 1990

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links