In December of 1989, he received his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Mathematics from Oklahoma State University which is located in Stillwater, OK. While at OSU, he taught several lab courses and assisted with web handling research. He received the "Herniated Cylinder Award" which recognizes the student that has left a positive mark on the department without breaking too much labequipment. He also participated on several intramural football and basketball teams. During his junior year, his city league basketball team took home the prize, the league championship !!
After graduating for OSU, he and his wife, Carolyn, headed for Atlanta where he began graduate studies in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In the spring of 1991, he passed the PhD qualifying exam as a Masters student which qualified him for the PhD program at Georgia Tech. He finished his Master of Science of degree in the Fall by writing a thesis entitled "Dynamic Control Modification Techniques in Teleoperation of a Flexible Manipulator" under the guidance of Professor Wayne J. Book. This work received an Oustanding Master's Thesis Award from Sigma Xi, an honorary organization on the Georgia Tech campus.
In 1993, he left the Georgia Institute of Technology for a four month internship at Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Richland, WA. While at PNL, he learned VxWorks, a multi-tasking operating system by Wind River Systems. After becoming comfortable with the system, he setup the programming environment between their SUN host machine and their flexible arm testbed which consisted of a 15 ft flexible beam and a Schilling manipulator. He wrote most of the low level code to program and setup the I/O boards in a VMEbus chassis used to control the robots. During his stay, he studied the dynamic coupling effects between the rigid micro-manipulator (i.e. the Schilling) and the flexible base (ie.e the flexible beam). Several experiments verified that the Schilling arm could be used to suppress vibration occurring in the flexible beam.
In the Fall of 1993, he returned to Georgia Tech and began converting the main control system of the Intelligent Machine Dynamics Laboratory from a PC environment to the VMEbus architecture. This process took nearly a year because of intermittent board problems and programming issues related to thecross compiler environment. The system became fully operational in January of 1995 and serves eight graduate students as a real-time control environment for flexible manipulator control.
As a result of the unexpectedly long conversion process, his PhD research has taken a backseat to more important computer issues. However, in late October, he presented his PhD proposal and plans to earn a PhD in Mechanical Engineering sometime this year. After graduation, he hopes to obtain a tenure-track faculty position in the areas of dynamic systems, measurement, instrumentation and control.