Joel Wakeman Burdick, IV

Timeline

1. 1959–1988

   Duke and a Stanford doctorate

   Born in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1959, he studies chemistry and mechanical engineering at Duke and earns a B.S. in 1981. At Stanford he earns an M.S. in 1982 and a Ph.D. in 1988, working on robotic force control with the postdoctoral researcher Oussama Khatib and under the advisors Thomas Binford and Bernie Roth.

2. 1988–1994

   Snake-like robots at Caltech

   He joins Caltech's mechanical engineering department as an assistant professor in 1988 and becomes an associate professor in 1994. With his first graduate student Gregory Chirikjian he builds snake-like hyper-redundant robots, including a thirty-degree-of-freedom model, and develops algorithms to plan their motion from sensor data.

3. 2002–2003

   Bioengineering joint appointment

   In 2002 he becomes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering at Caltech, with a joint appointment in the bioengineering department, and the IEEE Robotics Society appoints him a Distinguished Lecturer in 2003. He works with a Caltech cortical neurophysiologist on linking a monkey's brain to a robot arm, and introduces robotic electrodes that drive around the brain to optimize the signals they record.

4. 2005

   Technical adviser to Alice

   In 2005 he is a technical adviser to Team Caltech, whose driverless Ford E-350 van Alice is built by more than 50 undergraduates, graduate students and faculty advisers for the DARPA Grand Challenge desert race in October 2005. Caltech is one of only two universities that have competed in all five DARPA Grand Challenges.

5. 2011

   Spinal stimulation helps a man stand

   In 2011 a team from the University of Louisville, UCLA and Caltech reports that a man paralyzed below the chest stands, steps with assistance and moves his legs voluntarily under epidural stimulation. He develops the electromechanical technologies and computer algorithms for the work, and with Yu-Chong Tai introduces high-density epidural spinal stimulation. The team uses computational models and machine-learning algorithms to optimize the stimulation pattern.

6. 2020–2021

   Team CoSTAR in the SubT Challenge

   In 2020 Team CoSTAR, 60 engineers from the Caltech campus, JPL, MIT, KAIST and Sweden's Lulea University of Technology, takes first place at the Urban Circuit of DARPA's Subterranean Challenge in Elma, Washington. He leads the Caltech campus section of the team, and in September 2021 CoSTAR takes driving, walking and flying robots to the SubT final in a Kentucky limestone mine.

7. As of October 2026

   Hayman Professor and JPL scientist

   He becomes Hayman Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering at Caltech in 2012 and a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2014. His research covers robotic locomotion, sensor-based motion planning, multi-fingered manipulation, nonlinear control and neural prosthetics, and his courses include Advanced Robotics: Planning in 2026–27.