RIT - Department of Mechanical Engineering | People | Faculty

Wayne Walter Wayne Walter

Professor
Phone: 585-475-2925
E-mail: wwweme@rit.edu
Office: 3207 Gleason
URL: http://www.rit.edu/~wwweme

Biography:
Dr. Wayne Walter is the James E. Gleason Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). He received his BS in marine engineering from SUNY Maritime College, his MS in mechanical engineering from Clarkson University, and his Ph.D. in mechanics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Walter has worked for the U.S. Army, Rochester Products and Delco Products Divisions of General Motors, and Xerox, and is a registered professional engineer (P.E.) in New York State. He has thirty years experience teaching design related and solid mechanics courses, and has developed expertise in the areas of systems engineering, robotics systems, and micro-robotics. He has been an active member of the RIT Center for Manufacturing Studies (CIMS) and has been involved in a number of joint projects with local industries including Eastman Kodak and Xerox. He is currently co-chair of the Laboratory for Autonomous Cooperative Microsystems (LACOMS) working on locomotion of micro-robots with micro-sensors and actuators.

Over the years, Dr. Walter has worked in a number of technical areas. His Ph.D. dissertation and subsequent research activities were focused on vibrations of mechanical systems. Application areas included the flutter of helicopter rotor blades, and wings. His work with the US Army continued in this area. Dr. Walter worked for several years in the area of wind energy and alternative energy sources. After a five-year part-time working relationship with General Motors in their manufacturing development group, he developed the robotics lab at RIT, and was involved in many joint projects with local industries through the RIT Center for Manufacturing Studies. Along with a colleague, he developed the first Senior Design capstone courses at RIT, for which he won an ASME Curriculum Innovation Award. In the past two years, he developed a new course in Systems Engineering for the new RIT MS Program in Product Development.

Dr. Walter’s current focus is on autonomous cooperative microsystems consisting of microrobots for data gathering. As co-chair of LACOMS, he is working to facilitate the research in process by eight faculty and their graduate students in five departments within the Kate College of College of Engineering. MEMScouts is a LACOMS demonstration project currently being developed, which consists of a small airship, which drops sensor-based micro-robots on the ground for data gathering. Data is communicated back to the airship and to a ground station. Some of these are SENScouts, which are stationary, some are Groundscouts, which are ground-based mobile robots, some are AIRScouts, which fly about, and some are AQUAScouts for underwater data gathering. Dr. Walter’s research focus is on biologically inspired locomotion for GROUNDScouts, and has multiple graduate students doing thesis work in this area. He has interest in developing new micro-actuators and micro-sensors that assist this effort.