Research Focus
My research is focused on part orienting devices (POD's), low degree of freedom mechanisms capable of achieving complex spatial motions and rotations.
Current Research
My current wotk involves developing a new class of mechanisms called Reconfigurable Motion Generators (RMGs) that can offer some of the flexibility of traditional serial chain manipulators alongwith the advantages of parallel manipulators.
Other research involves finding invariant frames and displacement metric's for finite sets of rigid body displacements. The metric has potential applications in mechanism synthesis and robot motion planning.
Master's Thesis
My thesis titled "Approximate Motion Synthesis of Robotic Mechanical Systems" presents a novel methodology for approximate
motion synthesis of planar and spherical mechanisms using a Polar Decomposition based displacement metric. If you are interested here is the abstract and the table of contents. [ Download pdf 
]
Awards
Winner of 2011 NSF/ASME Design Essay Competition, 2011 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences, August 28-31, 2011, Washington, DC.
Winner of 2010 NSF/ASME Design Essay Competition, 2010 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences, August 15-18, 2010, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Winner of 2007 NSF/ASME Design Essay Competition, 2007 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences, September 4-7, 2007, Las Vegas, Nevada. [ Download pdf ]
Best Paper Award: “A Metric for Planar Displacements”, Proceedings of the 2007 Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics, Tampa, Florida.
Awarded NSF Student Travel Grant to present research on “Approximate Motion Synthesis of Robotic Mechanical Systems” at the NSF Design, Service, and Manufacturing Grantees and Research Conference, July 24-27, 2006, St.Louis, Missouri.
Clarkson University GENG ME Partial Merit Award in Fall 2004.
Publications*
“Panther Peer: A Web-Based Tool for Peer and Self Evaluation”, Proceedings of the ASME 2011 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (ASME/IMECE 2011), November 11–17, 2011, Denver, Colorado.
Venkatesh Venkataramanujam and Pierre M. Larochelle, A Coordinate Frame Useful for Rigid-Body Displacement Metrics, J. Mechanisms Robotics 2, 044503 (2010), DOI:10.1115/1.4002245. [ Download pdf ]
Venkataramanujam, V. and Larochelle, P., "PantherPeer: A web-based tool for peer evaluation", Proceedings of the 2010 Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics, Jacksonville, Florida, May 20 - 21, 2010. [ Download pdf ]
Venkataramanujam, V. and Larochelle, P., “A Displacement Metric for Finite Sets of Rigid Body Displacements”, Proceedings of the 2008 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE 2008), New York, New York, August 3-6, 2008. DETC2008-49554. ASME Press. [ Download pdf ]
Venkataramanujam, V. and Larochelle, P., "A Metric for Finite Sets of Displacements", Proceedings of the 2008 Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics, Melbourne, Florida, May 8-9, 2008. [ Download pdf ]
Larochelle, P., Murray, A., Turner, M., Perkins, D., and Venkataramanujam, V., "PODS: Novel Devices for Spatial Assembly Tasks", Proceedings of the 2008 NSF Engineering Research and Innovation Conference, Knoxville, Tennessee, January 7-10, 2008.
Venkataramanujam, V. and Larochelle, P., "Approximate Motion Synthesis of Spherical Kinematic Chains", Proceedings of the 2007 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences, Las Vegas, Nevada, September 4 - 7, 2007. DETC2007-34372. ASME Press. [ Download pdf ]
Venkataramanujam, V. and Larochelle, P., "A Metric for Planar Displacements", Proceedings of the 2007 Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics, Tampa, Florida, May 31 - June 1, 2007. [ Download pdf ]
Venkataramanujam, V. and Larochelle, P., "Approximate Motion Synthesis of Robotic Systems via a Polar Decomposition Based Displacement Metric", Proceedings of the 2006 Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics, Miami, Florida, May 25-26, 2006. [ Download pdf ]
* Most of the papers listed are available in print, and the corresponding copyright is held by the publisher. Whereas the papers can be downloaded for personal use, redistribution or reprinting for commercial purposes is expressly prohibited.
Poster Presentations
“Customerization in 2030: A Vision for the Premier Global Manufacturing Enterprise”, 2007 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences, September 4-7, 2007, Las Vegas, Nevada. [ Download pdf ]
“Approximate Motion Synthesis of Robotic Mechanical Systems”, NSF Design, Service, and Manufacturing Grantees and Research Conference, July 24-27, 2006, St.Louis, Missouri. [ Download pdf ]
“SFB Designer: Computer Aided Modeling and Manufacturing of Spherical Mechanisms via the Web”, 2006 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and
Information in Engineering Conferences, September 10 - 13, 2006, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. [ Download pdf ]
Updated Aug 01, 2008 9:25 AM