R. Andrew Hicks

Professor
Department of Mathematics
Drexel University
Mailing address:
3141 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia PA 19104-2875

(Above photo: me in a non-reversing mirror)
Office: Korman 262
Office Phone: (215) 895-2681
Fax: (215) 895-1582
Email address: ahicks@math.drexel.edu

Research and Publications

My work is primarily in optical design using tools from differential geometry, partial differential equations and computing.

Here is a list of my publications. You can view some descriptive pages of my optical designs.

I've also put together a fairly comprehensive webpage of catadioptric sensor design.

I enjoy algebraic topology, and I've written a simplicial topology package for Maple, Moise.

NSF Funded Projects

Media Coverage of My Work

Make Magazine, June 10, 2009.
Geo Magazine, May 2009.
Magic mirror doesn't reverse images Newslite, March 3, 2009.
The mirror that gives a true reflection The London Metro, March 1, 2009
Mathematician Creates Impossible, Rule-Bending Mirrors Gizmodo, February 25, 2009
New mirrors reflect text the right way round TechDigest, February 24, 2009.
Gallery: The next generation of mirrors, New Scientist, February 23, 2009.
New Mirror Eliminates Cars 'Blind Spots', Softpedia, January 19, 2009.
Driver's med: Rearview mirror, sans the blind spot, Scientific American, January 19, 2009.
A nice reflection, The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 1, 2009.
Invention: Flawless wing mirrors, New Scientist, December 3, 2008.
Reflective Optics: Free-form reflector eliminates driver's blind spot , Laser Focus World, October 1, 2008.
A fly's-eye view for spies in the sky, New Scientist, November 4, 2006.
GRASP Lab's latest kick: robot soccer, Pennsylvania Current, April 30, 1998.

Other Things

From 1996-99 I worked on vision based control of mobile robots at the UPenn GRASP laboratory:
- Around 1997 I had a Lego based robot with omnidirectional vision working pretty well. It could track and
  follow colored objects, and compute its position to the nearest mm, all using vision. Here is a movie.
  This was joint work with Harris Romanoff and Chris Geyer.
- In the next generation, we chose to try using some RC vehicles, which would be more robust
  than our first choice of Lego. Aveek Das mounted the spherical mirror on a clodbuster ,
  and we were ready to go in any environment! This example is teleoperated. Later John Spletzer
  did an amazing job of making these things autonomous. Kostas Daniilidis was project leader.
  This work ultimately evolved into the MARS project.
- The project then morphed into getting a robot to climb stairs. In this movie , the clodbuster climbs
  some wooden stairs that Aveek built, first shown with a standard camera, then with a spherical
  mirror based panoramic camera. The spherical mirror is a bit of overkill here. Note the cardboard
  framing of the mirror, and the plastic box that holds the mirror up. The box, from Arch Street Plastics
  (sadly gone) has almost no specular reflection. You can see the edges just a little bit.
- Finally, this movie shows an RC tank equipped with my rectifying mirror for the stair climbing.
  Thanks here go to Sang Hack Jung for image processing.
A movie from 1999 of me playing with a rectifying mirror.
A list of funny mathematical facts
The Drexel Hawk
A short introduction to Maple and its data structures
Many years back I gave a couple of introductory talks on fibre bundles. Here are the slides (pdf).

Last modified Tue Mar 17 14:18:18 EDT 2009