Dr. Rajan Bhatt

The University of Iowa
Center for Computer Aided Design (CCAD)
111 Engineering Research Facility
Iowa City, IA 52242
Phone: (319) 384-0530
Fax: (319) 384-0542
Email: rmbhatt@engineering.uiowa.edu 

Dr. Rajan Bhatt is an assistant research engineer at The University of Iowa's Virtual Soldier Research (VSR) program. He received his M.S. (Feb 04) and Ph.D. (Feb 07) degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a B.E. in mechanical engineering (Feb 01) from the MS University of Baroda, India. His research interests include modeling, simulation, and control of constrained multibody dynamic systems.

After receiving his bachelor's degree, Rajan worked for a year for a private firm in his hometown, Baroda, designing and analyzing (via motion simulation and finite element analysis) various mechanical components of screw air compressors, surface-finish vibrators, and injection molding machines for geographically distributed clients in India, Europe, and the USA.

He then received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University at Buffalo, specializing in the field of robotics. During this time, he worked on various projects like optimal path generation for a group of nonholonomic mobile robots, musculoskeletal analysis of jaws of sabertooth cats, and dynamic modeling and decoupled control of redundant nonholonomic mobile robots. He also instructed a graduate-level course in robotics and assisted in teaching many graduate- and undergraduate-level mechanical engineering courses.

After receiving an M.S. and before continuing for a Ph.D., he did a seven-month internship at Children's Hospital Los Angeles (starting Jan 04) and worked under researchers from Jet Propulson Labs in Pasadena on a project to build a wireless heterogeneous distributed sensor network platform with autonomous event detection and sensor processing capabilities, and real-time multisensor control and resource management.

Rajan recently (Mar 07) joined the VSR group at The University of Iowa and will be working with the predictive dynamics group to improve/add to the current functionalities of Santos.