Roberta Klatzky

Who is Roberta Klatzky?

Roberta "Bobby Lou" Klatzky is a Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. She specializes in human perception and cognition, particularly relating to visual and non-visual perception and representation of space and geometric shapes.Klatzky received a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1968 and a Ph.D in psychology from Stanford University in 1972. She has done extensive research on human haptic and visual object recognition, navigation under visual and nonvisual guidance, and perceptually guided action.

Her work has application to navigation aids for the blind, haptic interfaces, exploratory robotics, teleoperation, and virtual environments. Specifically, alongside Jack Loomis and the late Reginald Golledge, Klatzky played a major part in the development of the UCSB Personal Guided System, a GPS-based navigation system for the blind.