Dr. Davidson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University. He received his B.S. from the United States Military Academy at West Point, NY in 2004. After serving in the Army for five years, Dr. Davidson worked as a project manager for the CH2M HILL Plateau Remediation Company at Hanford, WA from 2009 to 2012. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from Washington State University and was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2016 to 2018.

Dr. Davidson's group performs fundamental and applied research at the intersection of mechanics, machine learning, and controls. Current areas of emphasis include robotic manipulation and soft robotics.

Selected Publications

• L.M. Dischinger, M. Cravetz, J. Dawes, C. Votzke, C. VanAtter, M.L. Johnston, C.M. Grimm, and J.R. Davidson, “Towards intelligent fruit picking with in-hand sensing,” in Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int’l Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), virtual, September 2021, pp. 3285-3291.
• A. You, H. Kolano, N. Parayil, C. Grimm, and J.R. Davidson, “Precision fruit tree pruning using a learned hybrid vision/interaction controller,” in Proc. IEEE Int’l Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Philadelphia, PA, May 2022, pp. 2280-2286.
• A. Silwal, J.R. Davidson, M. Karkee, C. Mo, Q. Zhang, and K. Lewis, “Design, integration, and field evaluation of a robotic apple harvester,” Journal of Field Robotics, vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 1140-1159, 2017.