Dr.
Kok-Meng Lee received his B. S. degree in mechanical engineering from the
State University of New York at Buffalo in 1980 and earned his S. M. and
Ph. D. degrees in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in 1982 and 1985 respectively. Since 1985, Dr. Lee
has been a faculty with the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Dr. Lee's research interests include system dynamics and control, robotics and automation, opto-mechatronics, information technology in manufacturing, automation in food product manufacturing. In 1979, he conducted radiation research as an undergraduate assistant at the SUNY-Buffalo, where he modelled and simulated the nongray particulate radiation in an isothermal cylindrical medium. At MIT, he designed high-performance fluidic amplifiers and fluid signal transmission systems and investigated analytically and experimentally the effects of temperature changes on fluid power control systems for flight backup control applications. Since 1985, his interest in dexterous actuators and sensors for high precision motion control systems and manufacturing automation has led to conduct some of the first detailed study on the creation of a three degrees-of-freedom (DOF) ball-joint-like variable-reluctance (VR) spherical motor and a means to provide non-contact direct sensing of roll, yaw, and pitch motion in a single joint. He then developed a flexible integrated vision system for real-time multi-degrees-of-freedom motion control systems. His vision-based motion control research has found several unique manufacturing automation applications which include high-precision servo tracking writing, robotic pickup of moving objects, automated transfer of live broilers to moving shackles, and automated de-boning process in poultry processing applications. In the mid-1990’s, he formulated the problem of object handling in the context of prey capture with the robot as a “pursuer” and a moving object as a passive “prey” using a vision-guided intelligent control system (VICS). The VICS concept feasibility was experimentally shown to be able to locate and pick up moving objects on a vibratory conveyor. More recently, Dr. Lee has made fundamental contributions to the field of object handling by extending the basic theory of prey-capture to include robust grasping of live, compliant objects that must be handled reliably at high speed in order to meet production throughput. These efforts have led to two on-going research funds (the U. S. Poultry and Eggs Association and the Georgia ATRP) to address the problems of transferring live birds from a moving conveyor to a processing line, where manufacturing of meat products is essentially a disassembly process and variations of birds’ shapes/sizes/reactions are generally not well-defined. This work has been recognized in the IEEE ICRA2000, the most scholarly known conference in the community of Robotics and Automation, with a Kaymori Best Paper Award. Other recognition includes the Rensselaer's 4th CIMAT Best Paper Award for his contribution in disassembly automation.
Dr. Lee has been an active member of the ASME Dynamic System and Control Division and of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. He has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transaction on Robotics and Automation and its Society Magazineand, and as an Editor for the IEEE/ASME Transaction on Mechatronics. He served as a Local Arrangement Chairperson in the 1993 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, and General Co-Chair and General Chair for the 1997 and 1999 IEEE/ASME International Conferences on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics respectively. Other recognition of his contributions includes the National Science Foundation (NSF) Presidential Young Investigator Award, Sigma Xi Junior Faculty Research Award, International Hall Of Fame New Technology Award, and two best paper awards. He holds six patents in machine vision, three degree-of-freedom variable reluctance spherical motor, and optical orientation encoder.